Creative Writing Program | Reading Series

Reading Series, Spring 2008

RICHARD POWERS, novelist

Richard Powers, winner 2006 National Book Award for Fiction for The Echo Maker, grew up in Illinois and Bangkok, Thailand. He received his B.A. and M.A. in English literature from the University of Illinois and began working as a computer programmer, but quit to work on his first novel, Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance. He subsequently moved to Holland, where he wrote Prisoner's Dilemma and The Gold Bug Variations. After some time in Cambridge, England, where he began his fourth novel, Operation Wandering Soul (a finalist for the 1993 National Book Award in Fiction), he accepted a writer-in-residence position at the University of Illinois. His other novels include Galatea 2.2, Gain, Plowing the Dark and The Time of Our Singing. His latest novel, The Echo Maker, won the National Book Award in 2006 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
His other awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction.
He teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is the Swanlund Professor of English and also attached to the Beckman Institute.

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