John Banville

William John Banville was born on 8 December 1945 in Co. Wexford, Ireland. Banville was first inspired to become a writer upon reading Dubliners by James Joyce when he was 13. He attended St Peter’s College in Wexford, but did not attend university upon graduating, choosing instead to work at Aer Lingus, which gave him the opportunity to travel widely. Following this, he worked in various editing positions at The Irish Press and The Irish Times between 1969 and 1990 – eventually working his way up to literary editor. 

Banville’s first book was a collection of short stories entitled Long Lankin, and was published in 1970, a year before he published his first full novel, Nightspawn (1971), which he has since publicly derided as “crotchety, posturing and absurdly pretentious”. Under his own name, Banville has since authored two non-fiction memoirs of Dublin and Prague and a total of twenty novels, including three separate trilogies: The Revolutions trilogy, The Frames trilogy and the Alexander and Cass Cleave trilogy. Banville has also adapted several plays by the German writer Heinrich von Kleist, written a number of radio plays, written the screenplays for film adaptations of The Last September and Albert Nobbs, and since 2006, he has written crime fiction under the pen name ‘Benjamin Black’, publishing a further 13 novels. 

Banville has received an extensive collection of awards and honours, most notably among them the AIB Fiction Prize for Birchwood (1973), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Doctor Copernicus (1976), the Guardian Fiction Prize for Kepler (1981), the Guinness Peat Aviation Literary Award for The Book of Evidence (1989), the Booker Prize for The Sea (2005), and two Irish Book Awards, in 2006 and 2012. His wider body of work also earned him the 1975 AWB Vincent Literary Award, the 1997 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the 2003 International Nonino Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the 2013 Irish PEN Award, the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, as well as membership of Aosdána in 1984, Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007 and the distinction of Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia in 2017.