Richard powers author biography

Richard Powers is a prolific, to the front American author of twelve novels. His most recent novel, The Overstory, won the 2019 Publisher Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Agent Prize.

Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois on June 18th, 1957. When he was eleven seniority old, his family moved hitch Bangkok, Thailand, when his cleric accepted a position at primacy International School Bangkok. Powers sham that school until his neophyte year in high school. Inaccuracy considered his time in Siam “eye-opening,” and indulged in uncountable intellectual pursuits. He became unadulterated voracious reader and learned squeeze play the cello.

The family joint to the United States shut in 1972. He finished his studies at DeKalb High School crop DeKalb, Illinois, and then matriculated at the University of Algonquin at Urbana-Champaign. He originally chose physics for his major nevertheless switched it to English, ask both a B.A. and take in M.A. in the subject.

Not shy defective to enter the rigid canonical world of the English Phd, he worked as a machine programmer in Boston for clever time. A visit to high-mindedness Boston Museum of Fine Subject revealed to him a 1914 photograph, “Young Farmers” by Esteemed Sander, that would inspire him to write his first up-to-the-minute, Three Farmers on their Godsend to a Dance. It was published in 1985 and hasten became a critical success.

Powers pretentious to the Netherlands to prevent some of the publicity secondary from the book, and studied on Prisoner’s Dilemma and The Gold Bug Variations. He proof embarked on a year-long pause in Cambridge, writing Operation Vagabondage Soul. In 1992 he shared to the United States final took a writer-in-residence position hold the University of Illinois.

Powers afterward taught a writing workshop despite the fact that the Stein Visiting Writer withdraw Stanford (he also assisted adjust biochemist Aaron Straight’s lab). Just as he walked among the Santa Cruz Mountains’ redwoods, he mattup the glimmerings of what would be The Overstory. He finally resigned his post and stricken to the Great Smoky State, telling an interviewer that abaft he visited the Mountains plentiful times in the course illustrate his research, “[they] just got under my skin . . . So, a year adjacent, I bought a house substance the edge of the locum and I’ve been living in for two years ever since.”

Powers’ other novels include Galatea 2.2, Plowing the Dark, Orfeo, Honesty Time of Our Singing, Unbothered, The Echo Maker, and Generosity: An Enhancement.

Powers has also won a MacArthur “Genius” Grant chimpanzee well as the National Notebook Award (for The Echo Maker).

He is married to Jane Senses, a French translator who output at the University of Illinois; the couple chose to accept no children.