Richard Powers is the multi-award-winning American author of 13 novels, who has now been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize.
The Overstory, shortlisted in 2018, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, among other honours. Powers says 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. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains and is currently delving into ‘what social media, deep learning, hidden algorithms, and surprisingly intelligent marine creatures have to do with one another.’
The astrobiology and neuroscience in Bewilderment – two fields undergoing rapid and dramatic revolutions – are really ways into much older and more intimate human passions
