Richard Powers is an American novelist, born in 1957, one of the most intellectually ambitious writers of his generation, drawing science, music and technology into large, humane fiction.
He came to novels by an unusual route: he began as a physics student before switching to literature, and worked for a time as a computer programmer in Boston. That double grounding runs through his work, which has ranged over genetics and music in The Gold Bug Variations, artificial intelligence in Galatea 2.2, and neuroscience in The Echo Maker, the last of which won the National Book Award.
His best-known novel is The Overstory, a sweeping story of nine Americans whose lives are drawn together by trees and the fight to save the world's forests; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker. He returned to more intimate ground in Bewilderment, in which a grieving astrobiologist seeks an unconventional way to help his troubled young son, again reaching the Booker shortlist, and has continued with Playground.
A MacArthur 'genius' Fellow who has taught at Illinois and Stanford, he writes fiction of rare scope, insisting that the largest scientific and ecological questions are, at heart, human stories.
