Richard Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois, and studied literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked as a computer programmer in Boston, and in 1980 left that job to write his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985).
He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989 and is professor emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Books
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985) · The Gold Bug Variations (1991) · Galatea 2.2 (1995) · Gain (1998) · The Time of Our Singing (2003) · The Echo Maker (2006) · Orfeo (2014) · The Overstory (2018) · Bewilderment (2021) · Playground (2024)
Awards
MacArthur Fellowship, 1989
National Book Award for The Echo Maker, 2006
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory, 2019