Richard Powers

Powers grew up partly in Bangkok, where his father worked as a school principal, before the family returned to Illinois; he trained as a physicist at the University of Illinois and worked briefly as a computer programmer before a chance encounter with a photograph by August Sander redirected him into fiction, becoming the seed of his 1985 debut, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.

His novels since have ranged across genetics, artificial intelligence, music theory, and neuroscience with equal technical fluency; The Echo Maker, about a man who no longer recognizes his sister after a brain injury, won the National Book Award. The Overstory, which follows nine characters drawn together by trees, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019 and became an unlikely bestseller for a novel built around ecological argument.

He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains, continuing to write novels driven by whatever science currently obsesses him.