Richard Powers

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Richard Powers, 2018

Richard Powers (born June 18, 1957 in Evanston , Illinois ) is an American writer . He is considered an important contemporary novelist. Powers is best known for his literary processing of scientific and philosophical topics, such as current brain research and its psychological implications in his best-known and award-winning work The Echo of Memory or musicality and its political relevance in his family saga The Sound of Time .

Life

Richard Powers grew up in a suburb of Chicago . At the age of almost eleven he went to Bangkok with his family , where his father had accepted a position as a teacher at the International School . After five years he returned to the USA and initially studied physics at the University of Illinois .

“I always wanted to be a scientist, first an oceanographer , later I studied physics… Gradually I got claustrophobic among physicists because of their reductionism, which requires such extreme specialization that every decision for one thing means a decision against a million other things. At that time, my old hobby of reading and writing turned out to be a calling. "

Powers changed subjects and studied literature , which also frustrated him. He initially took a job as a programmer . A photograph by August Sander in the Boston Art Museum showing three farmers from the Westerwald on their way to a festival in 1914 fascinated him so much that he quit his job and wrote his first novel, Three Farmers on the Way to Dance . The book was a surprising success.

In 1985 he moved to the Netherlands , where he finished his second novel, Prisoner's Dilemma , and another, The Gold Bug Variations . After a year in Cambridge , he returned to the United States in 1993. He accepted a teaching position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . He published five other novels. He currently resides in Urbana, Illinois .

In 1989 Powers received the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius Prize" and in 1999 the Lannan Literary Award . In 1998 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

In 2006, Powers received the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel The Echo of Memory . The novel The Overstory was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in April 2019 .

In 2008 Powers became the ninth person to have his genome sequenced, which he describes in his report Das Buch Ich # 9 .

In the summer semester of 2009 Richard Powers taught as a Samuel Fischer visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin.

In 2019, The Roots of Life was named Knowledge Book of the Year .

bibliography

  • 1985 Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (German: Drei Bauern auf dem Weg zum Tanz)
  • 1988 Prisoner's Dilemma
  • 1991 The Gold Bug Variations
  • 1993 Operation Wandering Soul
  • 1995 Galatea 2.2 (German: Galatea 2.2)
  • 1998 gain
  • 2000 Plowing the Dark (German: Schattenflucht)
  • 2003 The Time of Our Singing (German: The Sound of Time)
  • 2006 The Echo Maker (German: The Echo of Memory)
  • 2009 Generosity: An Enhancement (German: The greater happiness)
  • 2010 The Book Of Me (German: Das Buch Ich # 9)
  • 2014 Orfeo (German: Orfeo)
  • 2018 The Overstory (German: The Roots of Life)

German translations

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ pulitzer.org: "An ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them."
  2. ↑ Your own genome on the USB stick , Zeit Online September 10, 2010
  3. ↑ Richard Powers: Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor in the summer semester 2009 , website of the Free University of Berlin, accessed on August 12, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Powers, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Evanston , Illinois , USA