About Richard Powers
Richard Powers is the author of thirteen novels that explore connections among disciplines as disparate as photography, artificial intelligence, musical composition, ecology, genomics, game theory, virtual reality, race, biology and business. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, Grand Street, Conjunctions, Granta, The Guardian, Common Knowledge, Wired, Tin House, Zoetrope, Paris Review, The Believer, Best American Short Stories and The New York Times Sunday Magazine.
His books have won numerous recognitions including The Rosenthal and Vursell Awards, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize, the Corrington Award, a PEN/Hemingway Special Citation, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, two Pushcart Prizes and TIME Magazine's Book of the Year. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award. He won the W.H. Smith Literary Award for best novel of 2003 and the Ambassador Book Award in 2004. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award. He has been long-listed and was twice a finalist for the Man-Booker Prize. The Overstory was awarded the William Dean Howells Medal and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
About Moderator Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer is the author of 16 books, translated into 23 languages, and dealing with subjects ranging from the XIVth Dalai Lama to Islamic mysticism and from globalism to the Cuban Revolution. They include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul and The Art of Stillness. His latest, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, has been a national bestseller, and he’s just completing his next work, on his first 32 years with a community of Benedictine monks in Big Sur. He has also written the introductions to more than 70 other books, the liner notes for many Leonard Cohen albums and Criterion Collection movies and a screenplay for Miramax. Since 1986 he has been a regular essayist for Time, The New York Times, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books and many others.
His four TED talks have received more than 11 million views, and he has been featured in program-length interviews with Oprah, Krista Tippett and Larry King, among others. Born in Oxford, England in 1957, Iyer was a King’s Scholar at Eton and was awarded a Congratulatory Double First at Oxford, where he received the highest marks of any student on English Literature at the university. He received a second master’s degree at Harvard and was recently a Ferris Professor at Princeton.