Richard Powers

Biography

Richard Powers (born 1957) is the author of thirteen novels, each organized around a scientific or technological concept deployed as an ethical question. He studied physics before turning to literature, and the combination of scientific literacy and humanistic sensibility defines his work. He has said that The Overstory began after he moved from the Netherlands to the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, where his first sustained encounter with old-growth forest radicalized him in ways he hadn't expected. He spent years reading plant science — Suzanne Simard's work on mycorrhizal networks, Peter Wohlleben's forest research, David George Haskell's The Forest Unseen — before writing the novel, which functions partly as an act of advocacy for the research it dramatizes.

Richard Powers at a glance