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.

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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

Read more on Richard Powers

Image of Richard Powers for Monthly Spotlight

Where to start with Richard Powers: a guide to his best fiction

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

Reading guide: The Overstory by Richard Powers

Richard Powers’ radical and remarkable novel. Nine strangers are each summoned in different ways by the natural world to save it from catastrophe

An extract from The Overstory by Richard Powers

Richard Powers’ radical and remarkable novel. Nine strangers are each summoned in different ways by the natural world to save it from catastrophe

Richard Powers interview: ‘As a child, I was sure I was going to be an oceanographer'

The author of Playground, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, talks about his journey from physics to fiction, and the surreal book that showed him a novel ‘could make its own rules’

An extract from Playground by Richard Powers

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

Richard Powers on Offshore

As part of a series for the Booker website, shortlisted writers choose a book from the Booker Library that has had a profound impact on them. Richard Powers reaches out of his comfort zone to pick up Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, which, when he finally puts it down, leaves him ‘a different kind of reader’.

Richard Powers Q&A

‘I’ve just updated the fable for the age of pandemics, exoplanets, and mass extinction’

The astrobiology and neuroscience in Bewilderment – two fields undergoing rapid and dramatic revolutions – are really ways into much older and more intimate human passions

Richard Powers, Booker Prize Q&A, 2021