Richard Powers

American novelist, born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1957. His novels put science, music and the living world at the centre of the story: the genetic code in The Gold Bug Variations (1991), artificial intelligence in Galatea 2.2 (1995), the rise of an American chemical firm in Gain (1998), and two brothers caught between classical singing and the civil rights era in The Time of Our Singing (2003). The Echo Maker won the National Book Award in 2006, and The Overstory, a novel of trees and of the people who defend them, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019. Bewilderment (2021) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Playground (2024) longlisted. He has held a MacArthur Fellowship since 1989.