I read more than 120 single-volume books about trees, but unlike many of the other topics I’ve written about in the past, I was able to do a lot of the emotional research for the book just by being in the forest, in the woods.ĭo you put yourself in your characters? It feels like Nick Hoel, one of the principal figures in The Overstory, contains a lot of Richard Powers… It felt like literally a walk in the woods. What was really lovely about doing the research this time was that it didn’t feel like research. I feel like I don’t know a great deal about anything, but the books become the way of getting that first orientation into a way of seeing the world, a way of knowing the world that would otherwise have remained alien to me without making that narrative journey.
I wondered if you wrote about things because you already knew a lot about them, or if novels are your way of learning more about the things that interest you?
You’ve written novels about genetics, chemical engineering, neuroscience and now environmentalism. The Overstory is Powers’s 12th novel and yet, until his Pulitzer win, he was often referred to as “the best writer you’ve never heard of”. The novel takes a radical approach to time, seeking to present the lives of its “sentinel” trees alongside those of its human characters, intertwining normal narratological time with life “at the speed of wood”. It’s a book about the intricacy and beauty of trees, and about nine characters who are drawn into deep relationships with these trees. Powers’s richly layered novel engages profoundly with questions of protest and conservation. T here was something fitting about hearing the news that Richard Powers’s The Overstory had been awarded the Pulitzer prize just as Extinction Rebellion activists took to the streets of London.
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