The author of twelve novels as of 2020, Richard Powers's most recent work, The Overstory, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1957. At age eleven, his family moved to Bangkok, Thailand, when his father accepted a position at the city's International School. Young Richard attended that school until his freshman year of high school; during his family's time in Thailand, Richard became a voracious reader, and learned how to play the cello. He and his family returned to the United States in 1972, and Powers completed his high school education at DeKalb High School, in DeKalb, Illinois, before moving...