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The Missouri Review

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Richard Powers

Richard Powers has published eight novels, including Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2, Gain, Plowing the Dark, and The Time of Our Singing. Powers has been nominated for a National Book Award and is a three-time nominee for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a past recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, as well as of a Lannan Literary Award. In 1999, Esquire magazine named him one of five “Writers of the Decade.” [2003]

CONTRIBUTIONS

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Interviews

Mar 01 2003

An Interview With Richard Powers

Interviewer: You were born in the Midwest and moved to Thailand at age eleven. What effect did that experience have on you as a writer?

Powers: That’s such a huge question. It presumes I could somehow know what kind of writer I would have been had I not gone. But I know it affected my entire life – linguistically, intellectually, emotionally, culturally. I live in Bangkok from the age of eleven to sixteen, then came back to the States and finished high school in Illinois. But the years I spent overseas are so incredibly formative, the last years of childhood and the first years of young adulthood.