The National Book Award has been given to the likes of William Faulkner, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike and Flannery O’Connor. The University’s own Swanlund Professor of English, Richard Powers, has recently been added to that list for his novel, “Echo Maker.”

“Awards are wonderful in that they help you keep going,” Powers said. “The response has been incredibly uplifting.”

“I’m delighted that readers can be generous enough to respond fully to the books,” he said. He added that he is very happy when anyone “takes that kind of pleasure in my writing.”

Powers was born in Evanston, Ill., and spent his early childhood in Lincolnwood. At 11 years old, his family moved to Bangkok, Thailand. He then returned to Illinois to attend the University as an undergraduate. He has been a part of the University for 15 years.

Powers started as a physics major at the University and said he was interested in the standard threads of physics, chemistry and mathematics. He changed his major in his junior year to rhetoric. He later added a Master’s degree in English literature.

Growing up in both Illinois and Thailand “gave me kind of a double life,” Powers said. He said that he was both an insider and an outsider, a Midwesterner who had lived on the other side of the world.

He has both a sense of “belonging to and seeing outside Western culture,” he said.

He said that many of his books are set in the Midwest, and they draw upon the “scientific themes I first learned about here at the University,” he added. He said he is interested in “the openness of the Midwest and the potential of life on the prairie, coupled the scientific things I’ve learned in school.”

As a professor of English and teacher of a graduate student fiction workshop, he said that he has learned much from his students.

“It’s been greatly rejuvenating,” he said. “My students keep in touch with what’s happening and what’s important to younger people. Their energy is infectious.”

Powers said that the University has provided him with “absolute trust with the kind of books he wants to write.” The University has been incredibly supportive of his work, he said.

“I don’t know a writer who has a better home,” he added.

He said that the University grants him access to world class thinkers and scholars from all over the world in basically any subject. He only needs to walk out of the English Building and across the Quad in order to talk to a great mind, he added.

“The brainpower in this town is unbelievable,” he added.

Powers looks at writing as a way to investigate what it means to be alive.

“Writers are observers,” he said. “Writers watch people talk and try to see what people see; they are always looking to steal facts from life.”