Richard Powers

Richard Powers has received numerous honors including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction. He teaches in the Creative Writing M.F.A. program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, teaching a graduate seminar in multimedia authoring and an undergraduate course in the mechanics of narrative.

He enrolled at the University of Illinois as a physics major but was inspired to change fields after taking an honors literature seminar- which led to him earning an M.A. in English. After graduating, he worked in Boston as a technical writer and computer programmer while continuing to read voraciously. Soon after he had given up his job to focus on writing and three years later, in 1985, he published "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance." It was praised by critics, but what most excited Powers was that at the age of 32 his indecision was over,

Since then he has published a book every two to five years: "Prisoner's Dilemma" (1988), "The Gold Bug Variations" (stories, 1991), "Operation Wandering Soul" (1993), "Galatea 2.2" (1995), "Gain" (1998), "Plowing the Dark" (2000), "The Time of Our Singing" (2003), "The Echo Maker" (2006), "Generosity" (2009), "Orfeo" (2014), "The Overstory" (2018), and "Bewilderment" (2021).

His books share what Powers refers to as "a restlessness in theme", covering a multitude of areas but usually, if not always, exploring the effects of modern science and technology that, in Powers's words give an "an aerial view" - portraying humanity as just one small element in a complex universe.