‘I no longer have to save the world’: Novelist Richard Powers on fiction and the climate crisis

The Pulitzer-winning author of The Overstory on how ocean life inspired his latest novel – and why we need to rewrite our relationship with nature

Richard Powers was around 10 years old when his sister Peggy gave him what he now describes as a very unusual birthday present “for a kid in the northern suburbs of a midwestern city”: a book on coral reefs. But it was a revelatory choice, sparking in the novelist an explosion of curiosity and joy that has come to creative fruition over half a century later in his 14th novel, Playground. “I just thought, the world is actually huge and mysterious and ancient and out there, and I can’t get to it,” he tells me from his home in the Smoky Mountains, where he is surrounded by forest in every direction as far as the eye can see.

In the event, he didn’t have to wait that long to access the ocean for real – the following year, the family followed his father’s job as a school principal from Chicago to Bangkok, and Powers found himself scuba diving and snorkelling in the coral reefs of the South China Sea. Until the family moved back to the States six years later, Powers was convinced he would become, like one of Playground’s central characters, an oceanographer. That ambition gave way to physics and computer programming before, in 1985, he published his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. But the persistence of his many enthusiasms is evident in his fiction, from the mixture of music and DNA in 1991’s The Gold Bug Variations to the Pygmalion-inflected story of artificial intelligence in 1995’s Galatea 2.2 to the ecological and environmental concerns of his most recent novels, The Overstory and Bewilderment.