Richard Powers (born June 18, 1957) is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2024, Powers has published fourteen novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.
One of five children, Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois, the son of Richard Franklin Powers and his wife Donna Powers (née Belik). His family later moved a few miles west to Lincolnwood, where his father was a local school principal. When Powers was 11, they moved to Bangkok, Thailand, where his father had accepted a position at International School Bangkok. Powers attended this through his freshman year, ending in 1972. During that time outside the U.S., he developed skills in vocal music and proficiency in cello, guitar, saxophone, and clarinet. He also became an avid reader, enjoying nonfiction primarily and classics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The family returned to the U.S. when Powers was 16. Following graduation in 1975 from DeKalb High School in DeKalb, Illinois, he enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) with a major in physics, which he switched to English literature during his first semester. He earned a BA in 1978 and an MA in Literature in 1980.
In 2010 and 2013, Powers was a Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University, during which time he partly assisted in the lab of biochemist Aaron Straight.
Powers was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989. He received a Lannan Literary Award in 1999.
Powers was appointed the Swanlund Professor of English at UIUC in 1996.
On August 22, 2013, Stanford University announced that Powers had been named the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English.
As of 2018, he has retired and is now professor emeritus of English at UIUC.
Powers learned computer programming at Illinois as a user of PLATO and moved to Boston to work as a programmer. One Saturday in 1980, Powers saw the 1914 photograph "Young Farmers" by August Sander at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He was so inspired that he quit his job two days later to write a novel about the people in the photograph.
Powers worked for two years on his debut novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which was published by William Morrow in 1985. It comprises three alternating threads: a novella featuring the three young men in the photo during World War I, a technology magazine editor who is obsessed with the photo, and the author's critical and historical musings about the mechanics of photography and the life of Henry Ford. It was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. It also received a Special Citation from the PEN/Hemingway Awards.
Powers moved to the Netherlands, where he wrote Prisoner's Dilemma about The Walt Disney Company and nuclear warfare.
He followed with The Gold Bug Variations about genetics, music, and computer science. It was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
In 1993, Powers wrote Operation Wandering Soul about, among other things, a genetic condition that causes accelerated aging, and an agonized young surgical trainee. It was a finalist for the National Book Award.
In 1995, Powers published the Pygmalion story Galatea 2.2 about an artificial intelligence experiment gone awry. It was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
In 1998, Powers wrote Gain about a 150-year-old chemical company and a woman who lives near one of its plants and succumbs to ovarian cancer. It won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction in 1999.
His Plowing the Dark (2000) tells of a Seattle research team building a groundbreaking virtual reality while an American teacher is held hostage in Beirut. It received Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Powers wrote The Time of Our Singing in 2003. It is about the musician children of an interracial couple who met at Marian Anderson's famed 1939 concert on the Lincoln Memorial steps.
Powers's ninth novel, The Echo Maker (2006), is about a Nebraska man who suffers head trauma in a truck accident and believes his caregiver sister is an impostor. It won a National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.