Richard Powers

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For other persons named Richard Powers, see Richard Powers (disambiguation).

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

1 Life and work
2 Bibliography
3 External links
4 References

[edit] Life and work

Born in Evanston, Illinois, and interested in multiple sciences as a teenager, Powers enrolled as a physics major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He switched his studies to literature, receiving his M.A. in that subject in 1979. After graduation, he worked in Boston, Massachusetts, as a computer programmer until an encounter with a photograph at the Museum of Fine Arts inspired him to quit his job and spend the next two years writing his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which was published in 1985.

Powers then moved to the Netherlands, where he wrote Prisoner's Dilemma, a work that juxtaposes Disney and nuclear warfare, and then his best-known work to date, The Gold Bug Variations, a story that ties together genetics, music, and computer science.

Operation Wandering Soul, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1993,^[1] is about a young doctor dealing with the ugly realities of a pediatrics ward, was mostly written during a year's stay at the University of Cambridge, and completed when Powers returned to the University of Illinois in 1992 to take up a post as writer-in-residence.

Galatea 2.2 (1995) is a Pygmalion story, about an artificial intelligence experiment gone awry.

Gain (1998) is a look at the history of a 150-year-old chemical company, interwoven with the story of a woman living near one of its plants and succumbing to ovarian cancer.

Plowing the Dark (2000) is another novel with parallel narratives, this time of a Seattle research team building a groundbreaking virtual reality, while at the same time an American teacher is held hostage in Beirut, with a stunning outcome.

Powers' latest novel, The Echo Maker (2006), won the National Book Award.^[1]

He was a MacArthur Fellow in 1989 and received a Lannan Literary Award in 1999. He teaches in the Creative Writing M.F.A. program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.