John Banville

Born in Wexford on 8 December 1945, John Banville was educated at the Christian Brothers and St Peter’s College in Wexford. He did not attend university, but worked as a clerk and started writing. In 1969 he became copy-editor at the Irish Press and in 1983 he joined The Irish Times, first as sub-editor and from 1988 to 1999 as literary editor. Stories published in magazines in the late 1960s became his first (and only) short story collection, Long Lankin (1970), quickly followed by two novels: Nightspawn (1971) and Birchwood (1973). In 1976, Banville published Doctor Copernicus, the first novel of his ambitious science tetralogy: a series devoted to the life and ideas of major scientists. Kepler (1981), The Newton Letter (1982), and Mefisto (1986) completed the series. Banville’s exploration of morally compromised self-centered narrators in these last two novels was continued in The Book of Evidence (1989). Based on the life of a notorious Dublin murderer, it attracted considerable media attention and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995) completed this so-called art trilogy around Freddie Montgomery. The Untouchable, a fictionalized life of Soviet spy Anthony Blunt followed in 1997. Eclipse (2000), Shroud (2002), and Ancient Light (2012) form a second trilogy in Banville’s oeuvre, partly based on the life of deconstructionist critic Paul de Man. The year 2005 saw Banville win the Man Booker Prize for The Sea, the fictional memoir of a man who returns to a scene of childhood trauma while mourning the death of his wife. In the 1990s and 2000s Banville also branched out into other forms of writing. He adapted three plays of Heinrich von Kleist, The Broken Jug (1994), God’s Gift (2000), and Love in the Wars (2005); wrote two radio plays, A World Too Wide (2005) and Totdnauberg (2006); and adapted his own work and that of others for the screen. He also turned to crime fiction in 2006 with Christine Falls, published under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black. The book was well received and Banville has since written thirteen more crime fiction novels, under different pen names and, since 2020, his own name. While creating an entirely different fictional universe, mostly set in 1950s Ireland, the crime fiction does contain many Banville tropes and themes. Another “literary” novel, The Infinities was published in 2009, followed by The Blue Guitar (2015) and Mrs Osmond (2017), a sequel to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. In 2022 Banville wrote what he calls his final novel, The Singularities. It assembles a cast of characters from his previous novels in a fitting farewell. The Lock-Up (2023) is his last crime novel to date. Banville has won many literary awards, including the Kafka Prize and the Prince of Asturias Award. He was a member of Aosdána from 1984 to 2001.