Lannan Foundation

Richard Powers has said, “fiction can travel anywhere, and probably should.” He is the author of nine novels that explore connections among disparate disciplines such as photography, artificial intelligence, music composition, molecular biology, game theory, and American business.  His recent novel, The Echo Maker, which won the 2006 National Book Award, is a gripping mystery that explores the improvised human self and the even more precarious brain that splits us from and joins us to the rest of creation.  His other novels include Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Prisoner’s Dilemma, The Gold Bug Variations, Operation Wandering Soul, Galatea 2.2, Gain, Plowing the Dark, and The Time of Our Singing. He has been called one of the greatest American novelists of his generation.

Powers has received the “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation, 1989; National Book Critics Circle nomination for fiction, 1992; National Book Award nomination for fiction, 1993; and a Lannan Literary Award, 1999. He is currently Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Mr. Powers has said, “By revealing the book as a made thing, a thing that can both be lived in and accepted as real, one that calls attention to itself as something invented, an author can make the reader reflectively aware of the degree to which his life too is both received and invented. If we can preserve that dual sense, then we reserve the ability to go on writing our lives.”