John Banville (Irish writer) Add a review

William John Banville (born 8 December 1945) is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter. A former member of Aosdána, he voluntarily relinquished the financial stipend in 2001 to another, more impoverished, writer.

Banville has been publishing books since 1970, when a short story collection appeared, with his first novels emerging soon after. His "Revolutions Trilogy", published between 1976 and 1982, comprises works named after renowned scientists: Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and The Newton Letter. His next work, Mefisto, had a mathematical theme, and, in combination with the three books from the "Revolutions Trilogy," is the fourth book from the "Scientific Tetralogy." Banville's 1989 novel The Book of Evidence began the "Frames Trilogy," dealing with the work of art; it was completed by Ghosts and Athena during the 1990s. This early fiction was the subject of numerous academic studies in the late 20th-century, including Rüdiger Imhof's John Banville: A Critical Introduction (1989), Joseph McMinn's John Banville: A Critical Study (1991) and The Supreme Fictions of John Banville (1999).

Doctor Copernicus won him the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and he also won the 2003 International Nonino Prize. His thirteenth novel — The Sea — won the Booker Prize in 2005, and with it came wider international recognition for Banville amongst the reading public. Subsequently, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007, and recognised with a selection of European accolades, among which were the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize from Czechia, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature from Spain. Italy made Banville a Cavaliere (knight) of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia in 2017. Born and raised in the town of Wexford in the southeast of Ireland, and living in Howth, Dublin, he has been mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Banville had a 30-year career working in the Irish newspaper industry, and served as literary editor of The Irish Times between 1988 and 1999. As Benjamin Black, he took to publishing crime novels in later life, mostly based in 1950s Dublin and featuring an Irish pathologist character named Quirke. An alternative history novel, The Secret Guests, was published under the name B. W. Black in 2020.