Richard Powers

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**Richard Powers**
Richard Powers at the University of Toronto following a guest lecture March 17, 2006. (Photo by David Topping)
Born:	June 18, 1957 (age 49) Evanston, Illinois
Occupation:	Novelist
Nationality:	United States
Genres:	Literary fiction
Debut works:	Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985)

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. Upon enrolling in graduate school at Illinois, 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 for Fiction 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.

The Time of Our Singing (2003) is a story about the musician children of an interracial couple who met at Marian Anderson's legendary concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. Powers displays his knowledge of music and physics in this exploration of race relations and the burdens of talent.

Powers' latest novel, The Echo Maker (2006), won a 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 and is a Swanlund Professor of English.