21 Facts About Richard Powers

Richard Powers was born on June 18,1957 and is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology.

Richard Powers has won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship.

Richard Powers won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.

One of five children, Richard Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois.

Richard Powers's family later moved a few miles west to Lincolnwood, where his father was a local school principal.

When Richard Powers was 11, they moved to Bangkok, Thailand, where his father had accepted a position at International School Bangkok, which Richard Powers attended through his freshman year, ending in 1972.

Richard Powers became an avid reader, enjoying nonfiction primarily and classics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Richard Powers earned a BA in 1978 and an MA in Literature in 1980.

Richard Powers decided not to pursue a PhD partly because of his aversion to strict specialization, which had been one reason for his early transfer from physics to English, and partially because he had observed in graduate students and their professors a lack of pleasure in reading and writing.

In 2010 and 2013, Richard Powers was a Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University, during which time he partly assisted in the lab of biochemist Aaron Straight.

Richard Powers was appointed the Swanlund Professor of English at UIUC in 1996, where he is currently an emeritus professor.

Richard Powers learned computer programming at Illinois as a user of PLATO and moved to Boston to work as a programmer.

One Saturday in 1980, Richard Powers saw the 1914 photograph "Young Farmers" by August Sander at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and was so inspired that he quit his job two days later to write a novel about the people in the photograph.

Richard Powers spent the next two years writing the book, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which was published by William Morrow in 1985.

Richard Powers moved to the Netherlands, where he wrote Prisoner's Dilemma about The Walt Disney Company and nuclear warfare.

Richard Powers followed with The Gold Bug Variations about genetics, music, and computer science.

In 1993, Richard Powers wrote Operation Wandering Soul about an agonized young pediatrician.

In 1995, Richard Powers published the Pygmalion story Galatea 2.2 about an artificial intelligence experiment gone awry.

In 1998, Richard 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.

Richard Powers's ninth novel, 2006's The Echo Maker, is about a Nebraska man who suffers head trauma in a truck accident and believes his caregiver sister is an imposter.

In 2014, Richard Powers wrote Orfeo about Peter Els, a retired music composition instructor and avant-garde composer who is mistaken for a bio-terrorist after being discovered with a makeshift genetics lab in his house.