Richard Powers

Richard Powers is an award-winning American novelist whose works often focus on the intersection of science and the human condition. Powers has published 12 novels, several collections of short stories, and one nonfiction work. His novels have been shortlisted for numerous awards and have appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Born in Evanston, Illinois on June 18, 1957, Powers earned a BA in English literature at the University of Illinois and an MA in mathematics at the same school. He earned his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1982 and was a lecturer in writing and mathematics at Princeton University from 1986-89.

Powers received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2001. His works are often praised for their expansive scope, humanism, and strong vision.

Powers’ debut novelThree Farmers on Their Way to a Dance won the William Faulkner Award for Best First Novel in 1985. The book tells the story of three men and their families who, for three generations, till a patch of land off the Rhine near Mainz. The novel examines the ways in which society shapes and is shaped by the natural world, and how both are intrinsically intertwined.

His second novel, Prisoner’s Dilemma, is set in England in the late 1980s and deals with the clash between science and religion in the face of a possible nuclear war. It explores questions surrounding human lives in a world where morality and humanity are challenged by scientific knowledge and advances in technology.

Powers’ third novel, Gain, examines the lives of two women, Claire and Laura, and the pharmaceutical industry they both inhabit. Claire is a corporate executive in a company that produces pharmaceuticals, while Laura is a researcher in the same field. The novel is a meditation on modern materialism and a reflection on how individuals fight against their own biology in their attempt to gain more.

Powers’ eighth novel, The Echo Maker, won the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The story tells the tale of Mark Schluter, a 36-year-old man who suffers from a mysterious brain injury and has a condition known as Capgras Syndrome, which causes him to mistake strange people as people from his past. The novel tackles questions surrounding perception, identity, and the capacity to tell reality from false realities.

Powers’ most recent novel, The Overstory, was released in 2018 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It focuses on nine characters whose lives intersect through their relationships with trees. As their stories intertwine, they become a part of a larger, mythic story and come to discover the power of the natural world and their place and responsibility to it.

Richard Powers’ works have become important in exploring the complexities of science and the human experience. His stories have won him numerous distinguished awards, and will likely continue to do so for many years to come.