“For me, this is a marvelous late-career recognition,” Powers said by phone just after he heard the news. “It’s my 12th book, and I’ve been writing for over a third of a century, so there have been ups and downs, and it’s a marvelous reward for staying the course. But perhaps for environmental fiction, there’s a little bit more to it. This is one of the chief literary recognitions that this country gives out, and it’s been given to a book that wants above all else to take nonhumans seriously and to take our relationship with those outside of the human world seriously. And that’s encouraging.”<doc-sep>The 2019 Pulitzer Prizes were announced in New York on Monday afternoon, with novelist Richard Powers taking the fiction award for “The Overstory,” his ecological novel warning of an upcoming environmental catastrophe. Powers’ novel, also a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, beat out two finalists for the fiction award: Rebecca Makkai’s novel “The Great Believers” and Oakland author Tommy Orange’s debut novel, “There There,” about contemporary Native American life. Makkai’s novel, a tale of friendship that moves from Chicago to Paris, also won the L.A. Times Books prize for fiction on Friday. Barstow native Forrest Gander was named winner in the poetry category for his collection “Be With.” Long Beach poet Jos Charles was nominated for her “feeld,” along with A.E. Stallings’ “Like.” David W. Blight won the history prize for “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” with Victoria Johnson’s “American Eden: David Hosack,Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic” and W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s “Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition” as finalists. Advertisement UC Santa Barbara professor Jeffrey C. Stewart won the biography award for “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke.” Finalists in that category were Max Boot for “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam” and Caroline Weber’s “Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris.” In general nonfiction, Eliza Griswold won the award for “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” with Elizabeth Rush’s “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore” and Bernice Yeung’s “In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers” named finalists.<doc-sep>A teaching job at Stanford University left Richard Powers nestled between a hive of technological activity in Silicon Valley and the Santa Cruz mountains with their majestic varieties of redwood tree. As a novelist interested in all manner of systems — from ecosystems to computer programming — Powers found this intersection intriguing. Our culture would refer to the tech as “progress” and the mountains and trees as “nature.” But Powers isn’t much for such labels, even those that were codified ages ago. His 12th novel, “The Overstory,” tells a longer story about humans and trees. He compresses generations of human life into rings that extend outward over time (and printed on recycled paper). But more than telling an epic story about people, Powers’ book asks for a paradigm shift in how we consider the planet. As evidenced in the conversation that follows, he thinks humankind has allowed the concept of exceptionalism to blind it to the fact that nature isn’t some other entity. Powers’ interest in systems prompts him to maximize the data available. So he’s willing and able to envision consequences of behaviors across time. For humans, his view sounds ominous in “The Overstory” as well as our current existence. Richard Powers with Tayari Jones When: 7:30 p.m. Monday Where: Stude Concert Hall, Rice University, 6100 Main Details: $5; 713-521-2026, inprinthouston.org See More Collapse But anybody who has visited ruins of old civilizations in Central or South America will know that the entity we call nature will ultimately prevail, even if it suffers casualties along the way. Like the Tom Waits song: “You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it always comes roaring back again.” Powers last week won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Overstory.” He’ll appear in Houston on Monday with Tayari Jones at an Inprint Houston event. Q: Congratulations on the Pulitzer. I’m sure you don’t start an epic novel about trees — or any novel, for that matter — thinking, “This one’s the Pulitzer bait!” But it must be nice just the same. A: (Laughs.) Well, thank you. No, you don’t really write with any of that in mind. But it is a wonderful recognition. Q: The book touches on the ’90s timber wars. I figure you’d appreciate this: Years ago my wife and I were in Washington, and she thought it would be funny to take a “Twilight” tour. And the tour guide wasn’t a vampire-loving fanboy or fangirl but rather an out-of-work logger. A: That’s interesting. I came across so many references to that town while researching passages in the book that are set during the timber wars. That town really is a case study of this belief that we somehow have to choose between the economic or the environmental, or economy verses ecology. But it’s very interesting to see a town like that change and reinvent itself. Q: The book starts out with an interesting chapter on the Hoel family, westward-moving immigrants who salvaged a chestnut tree. I thought the way you compressed numerous generations was a little like making them rings in a tree. A: Yeah, yeah, it’s kind of a narrative time lapse in a way. A seed germinating and a flower blooming, you understand that and see the intentionality of a plant; that’s a visual that makes sense to us. But to me, this was the inverse of that. In order to give a sense of the narrative arc of an individual tree or a forest, you had to have human beings scurry around in the foreground. That had to happen to give you a sense of a grand narrative arc of the life beyond human life. Q: One of the key ideas you wanted to get across was that nature isn’t this other thing with which we interact. A: That’s right. So if anything, this is a story about the tragedy in the belief of human exceptionalism. That somehow we make our own rules, and we can master and dominate all these elements. The … inconveniences of the world. Where we try to simplify things down to what can be controlled and managed. And if you take exception with exceptionalism, you have to take exception to the idea of nature as something outside of us. There’s no separate thing called “nature.” We’re interdependent. If we understood interdependence and saw other living creatures not as an inconvenience, then we wouldn’t be in the catastrophe that we’re in. Q: So you don’t like our long-range odds? A: (Laughs.) No. We’ve been under the influence of this dream of mastery for so long. Even as the planet itself changes; as freak weather becomes the norm; familiar patterns of cyclical life change so drastically; species counts crash; catastrophic emergencies skyrocket … we still have this belief that we’ll be able to handle it as it comes. We’ll build a bigger sea wall. That will do it until things settle down. We haven’t as a species awakened to the fact that it’s not going to work that way. Q: The book, like our culture, is full of people who suggest ecology and progress can’t be reconciled. A: And the word “economics” and the word “ecology” come from the same root. They come from the old Greek word meaning “housekeeping.” We do think economics and ecology are at war with each other. And as long as we think of them as separate and opposed to each other, we’re hosed. The problem with our idea of economics is we’re good at externalizing cost. But we’re not doing the bookkeeping to pay for the things we’re doing as we go along. Q: I was reminded of that book “The Song of the Dodo,” about the fragility of ecosystems. I believe the metaphor was to envision a nice Persian rug cut into 36 pieces. Take away a piece, and you can still observe the detail. But the rug isn’t what it was. A: That’s right. And one thing I had my eyes open to working on the book was time and the scale of regeneration. The cutters in the book used the phrase, that idea (of) why worry about these things. They grow back. The reality is, yes, the tree will grow back quickly, but an ecosystem does not. And they don’t go back to what they were before they were destroyed. The reality is there’s not a human being who has lived who has seen the complexity and richness and stability of an old-growth forest. It hasn’t happened in the course of human history. It’s like the Aldo Leopold thing: Don’t throw away the parts. Hold onto the parts. But we’re losing the parts. And not everything comes back. andrew.dansby@chron.com<doc-sep>
Richard Powers’ epic nature novel The Overstory has won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The sweeping and evocative novel, which unfolds in interlocking fables tracing the relationship between humanity and the natural world, has been one of 2018’s most lauded. It was also shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and the (still pending) PEN/Faulkner Award, and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal: three of the most prestigious awards recognizing English-language fiction. The prolific Powers won the 2006 National Book Award for his ninth and most acclaimed novel, The Echo Maker, which was a Pulitzer finalist. Named finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize were two more literary awards season mainstays: Rebecca Makkai’s ’80s queer novel The Great Believers, and Tommy Orange’s Oakland-set debut There There. The former won the equivalent Los Angeles Times book prize just this weekend, and most prestigiously, was awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal. Both The Great Believers and There There ranked among EW’s Top 10 Books of 2018. Elsewhere among this year’s Pulitzer winners in books, Jeffrey C. Stewart’s biography of Alain Locke, The New Negro, won the prize for Biography, following up on its National Book Award win, and David W. Blight’s Frederick Douglass volume was named the prize-winner for History. On the drama side, Jackie Sibblies Drury pulled off an upset with a victory for her Off Broadway play Fairview, which the Pulitzer Committee celebrated as “a hard-hitting drama that examines race in a highly conceptual, layered structure, ultimately bringing audiences into the actors’ community to face deep-seated prejudices.” (A notable finalist in Drama was Heidi Schreck for her breakout play What the Constitution Means to Me, currently on Broadway.) Finally, Aretha Franklin received a posthumous special citation, “for her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades.” Check out the full list of winners below. JOURNALISM Public service: Staff of the South Florida Sun Sentinel Breaking news reporting: Staff of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Investigative reporting: Matt Hamilton, Harriet Ryan and Paul Pringle of the Los Angeles Times Explanatory reporting: David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner of the New York Times Local reporting: Staff of the Advocate National reporting: Staff of the Wall Street Journal International reporting: Maggie Michael, Maad al-Zikry and Nariman El-Mofty of the Associated Press, and the staff of Reuters Feature writing: Hannah Dreier of ProPublica Commentary: Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Criticism: Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post Editorial writing: Brent Staples of the New York Times Editorial cartooning: Darrin Bell, a freelancer cartoonist Breaking news photography: Photography staff of Reuters Feature photography: Lorenzo Tugnoli of The Washington Post Special citation: Staff of the Capital Gazette BOOKS, DRAMA AND MUSIC Fiction: The Overstory by Richard Powers Nonfiction: Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America by Eliza Griswold Drama: Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury History: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight Autobiography or Biography: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart Poetry: Be With by Forrest Gander Drama: Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury Music: p r i s m by Ellen Reid Special citation: Aretha Franklin