Diversity of voices, diversity of languages : one week of events and readings in Lyon and in the Rhône-Alpes region.
Richard Powers
Richard Powers © John Foley / Opale / Le Cherche Midi
AUTHOR
United States
BiographY
Richard Powers studied physics at the University of Illinois, earned a degree in literature in 1979, then worked in Boston as a computer programmer until he met a photographer at the Beaux Arts. This meeting touched him so deeply he quit his job to write his first novel, Trois fermiers s’en vont au bal, published in 1985.
He then moved to the Netherlands, where he wrote Prisoner’s Dilemma then The Gold Bug Variations, which intertwines genetics, music and computer science. Operation Wandering Soul was written during a one-year visit to Cambridge University before returning to Illinois. A renowned writer, in 1995 he published Galatea 2.2, which recounts an experiment with artificial intelligence, and Gain in 1998, which simultaneously traces the evolution of a chemical-product company and the decline of a woman with cancer.
Plowing the Dark, published in 2000, follows the same format but deals with virtual reality. Powers continues to explore the effects modern science has on people's lives in his novels.
