As the American author with the most Booker Prize nominations, Richard Powers’ books often explore the intersection between technology with the natural world. Here’s our guide to his ever-expanding list of powerful novels
Richard Powers
Richard Powers is a multi-award-winning American author. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains
His fiction often explores the effects of science and technology on humanity, and he has been nominated for the Booker Prize four times, most recently for his novel Playground in 2024. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award in 2006. The Overstory, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2018, also won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, among other honours. Powers has previously said he is partially indebted to Booker-winner Margaret Atwood for his 2021-shortlisted novel Bewilderment, which explores the anxiety of family life on a damaged planet.
Polynesian islanders prepare to vote on a billionaire’s seasteading project in an exhilarating novel that distils subjects as diverse as climate change and colonialism
The 2024 judges on Playground
The astrobiology and neuroscience in Bewilderment – two fields undergoing rapid and dramatic revolutions – are really ways into much older and more intimate human passions
Video highlights
All nominated books
Playground explores that last wild place we have yet to colonise and interweaves profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity
With pitch perfect precision, Richard Powers tells the story of a musician journeying into his past as he desperately flees the present
Richard Powers’ radical and remarkable novel. Nine strangers are each summoned in different ways by the natural world to save it from catastrophe
An astrobiologist thinks of a creative way to help his rare and troubled son in Richard Powers’ deeply moving and brilliantly original novel
Features
- Book recommendations
Booker Prize books that have been adapted for film and television
- Book recommendations
10 Booker Prize-nominated books that feature unlikely friendships
- Book recommendations
Where to start with Richard Powers: a guide to his best fiction
- Competition
Win a copy of The Overstory by Richard Powers
- Book extract
An extract from The Overstory by Richard Powers
- Reading guides
Reading guide: The Overstory by Richard Powers
- Book recommendations
13 of the best speculative fiction novels, nominated for the Booker Prizes
- Book recommendations
14 Booker-nominated books that will change your worldview, as chosen by our readers
- Book recommendations