Richard Powers was born on June 18, 1957, in Evanston, a United States citizen whose early education took him across considerable distances. He attended both DeKalb High School in Illinois and the International School Bangkok in Thailand before returning to study at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, including its College of Media. That combination of domestic and international schooling shaped a writer whose working life has since brought together the roles of novelist and programmer.

Powers works as a novelist and science fiction writer, composing in English, and as of 2024 has published fourteen novels. His work includes Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Galatea 2.2, and Operation Wandering Soul, titles that range across history, technology, and human experience. The Echo Maker stands among his notable works as well, drawing on neuroscience and questions of identity and memory to demonstrate the kind of range that has defined his output across fourteen books.

The honors that have accumulated over his career reflect that range. Powers received a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has also been recognized with the Dos Passos Prize, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, the Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a collection of awards spanning literary, historical, and institutional lines.

Alongside his writing, Powers has taught at both the University of Illinois and Stanford University. As a living author, he continues to work in English, with fourteen novels behind him and his career still active. His dual background as a novelist and programmer remains one of the more distinctive combinations in contemporary American fiction.