John Banville

Born:	December 8, 1945 (age 60) Wexford, Ireland
Occupation(s):	Novelist
Nationality:	Irish
Debut work(s):	Long Lankin

John Banville (born 8 December 1945) is an Irish novelist and journalist. His novel, The Book of Evidence (1989), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation Award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. Image File history File links John_Banville. ... December 8 is the 342nd day (343rd in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1945 (MCMVL) was a common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1945 calendar). ... Wexford (Irish: Loch Garman) is the county town of County Wexford in the Republic of Ireland. ... Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. ... A novel is an extended work of written, narrative, prose fiction, usually in story form; the writer of a novel is a novelist. ... In English usage, nationality is the legal relationship between a person and a country. ... December 8 is the 342nd day (343rd in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1945 (MCMVL) was a common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1945 calendar). ... The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, also known as the Booker Prize, is one of the worlds most prestigious literary prizes, awarded each year for the best original full-length novel written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland in the English language. ... The Sea is the eighteenth novel by John Banville. ... The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, also known as the Booker Prize, is one of the worlds most prestigious literary prizes, awarded each year for the best original full-length novel written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland in the English language. ...

Banville is regarded as one of Ireland's finest writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and a supreme stylist. He is known for his precise—some would say cold—prose style, Nabokovian in inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков, pronounced ) (April 22, 1899 [O.S. April 10], Saint Petersburg – July 2, 1977, Montreux) was a Russian-American author. ...

Biography

Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland. His father worked in a garage and died when he was in his early thirties; his mother was a housewife. Banville is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is also a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own. Wexford (Irish: Loch Garman) is the county town of County Wexford in the Republic of Ireland. ...

Educated at a Christian Brothers' school and at St Peter's College in Wexford, he did not attend university. After school he worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus which allowed him to travel at deeply-discounted rates. Aer Lingus is the national airline of Ireland. ...

He lived in the United States in 1968-9. On his return to Ireland he became a sub-editor at the Irish Press newspaper, rising eventually to the position of chief sub-editor. The Irish Press was an Irish newspaper published by Irish Press plc between 1931 and 1995. ...

His first book, Long Lankin, appeared in 1970.

When the Irish Press collapsed in 1995 he became a sub-editor at the Irish Times newspaper. He was appointed literary editor in 1998. The Irish Times, too, suffered severe financial problems and Banville was offered the choice of taking a redundancy package or working as a features department sub-editor. He left. Banville has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1990. The Irish Times is Irelands newspaper of record, launched in the late 1850s. ... The New York Review of Books (or NYREV or NYRB) is a biweekly magazine on literature, culture, and current affairs published in New York which takes, as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity. ...

He has two adult sons (Colm and Douglas) by his wife, the American textile artist Janet Dunham. They met during his visit to San Francisco in 1968 where she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. His wife described him during the writing process as being like "a murderer who's just come back from a particularly bloody killing." This page is a candidate for speedy deletion. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, and by other names, see below) is the oldest and flagship campus of the ten-campus University of California system. ...

He has two daughters aged 9 and 16[in 2005] (Alice and Ellen) from a relationship with Patricia Quinn, former head of the Arts Council of Ireland. He lives in central Dublin. The Arts Council of Ireland is a government funded body which promotes art in the Republic of Ireland. ... WGS-84 (GPS) Coordinates: 53. ...

He was elected to Aosdána in 1984 but resigned in 2001 so that some other artist might be allowed to receive the cnuas. Disambiguation: you may also be looking for Aois-dàna or Aes Dana Aosdána (from aos dána, Irish people of the arts) is an association of people in Ireland who have achieved distinction in the arts. ...

Awards

The Sea is the eighteenth novel by John Banville. ... The Sea is the eighteenth novel by John Banville. ...

Style

John Banville is considered by critics as a master stylist of the English language, and his writing has been described as perfectly-crafted, beautiful, dazzling. David Mehegan, of the Boston Globe calls Banville, "One of the great stylists writing in English today;" Don DeLillo calls his work "dangerous and clear-running prose;" and the UK Observer described his 1989 work, The Book of Evidence, as "flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita." Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American author best known for his novels, which paint detailed portraits of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... Lolita For other uses, see Lolita (disambiguation). ...

He is also known for his dark humour, and sharp wit.

Banville quotations

• [My parents were] small people, small, good, decent people, who lived very circumscribed lives. Leaving the nest so early was hard for them and, when I look back now, I realise how cruel I was.
• (About his father's death) Someone said the best gift a man can give his son is to die young. When you think about it, it's true. I was in my early 30s and I did feel freed by it, awful as it is to confess.
• ...those who regard me as effete, arrogant, distanced. [Interviewer: All of which is true, of course.] [Banville:] Of course!
• I regard Nietzsche as the greatest philosopher in our time
• I don’t like fiction as a form. I think it’s childish. It’s too coarse. Which is why I’m trying to change it. My modest ambition in life is to change the novel entirely!
• This book has come out which says that people who know me say I’m ‘prickly and arrogant’. Okay, I am!
• (His books) ...they're all cold, or so I'm told anyway. I don't find them cold. I find them embarrassingly emotional, throbbing with anguish and aches.
• I don't understand politics, how it works...I don't understand the intricacies. Power. I don't understand power.
• All works of art are scar tissue.
• I couldn't live on my own...I have to have people around me. Outside the door. I have to know they are outside that door.
• ...that is a large part of sex. The sense of mutual, joyful damage.
• (Describing sex in The Book of Evidence) He inflicted his tender damage on her.
• I find women very strange. I don't understand them at all...I don't much like the company of men.
• I now belong to a small band of big Bs - Botticelli, Banville and Beethoven. But not necessarily in that order.
• (On being reprimanded for a minor factual error in an article, one he dismissed as a technicality) Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the Department of Trivia.
• (On the Booker Prize) There are plenty of other rewards for middle-brow fiction. There should be one decent prize for real books.
• (On winning the Booker Prize) It is nice to see a work of art win the Booker prize.
• I have been, at last, Bookered.
• (On publicity) We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us. I'm afraid I'm not very demonstrative.
• (Reviewing Ian McEwan's Saturday) In a note of acknowledgment at the end of the book McEwan names the various doctors who shared their expertise with him, including...the Nabokovianly named Frank T. Vertosick Jr., to whom he is indebted for an account of a transsphenoidal hypophysectomy—yes, there are many big words in this book.
• (Adjectives used by Banville in his book, The Sea) Flocculent...cinereal...crepitant...velutinous.
• (On bitchy reaction to his Booker win among London's literati) If they give me the bloody prize, why can’t they say nice things about me?

Works

• Long Lankin (1970; revised ed.1984)
• Nightspawn (1971)
• Birchwood (1973)
• Doctor Copernicus: A Novel (1976)
• Kepler, a Novel (1981)
• The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982)
• Mefisto (1986)
• The Book of Evidence (1989)
• Ghosts (1993)
• The Broken Jug: After Heinrich von Kleist (1994) - a play
• Seachange (performed 1994 in the Focus Theatre, Dublin; unpublished)
• Athena: A Novel (1995)
• The Ark (1996) (only 260 copies published)
• The Untouchable (1997)
• God's Gift: A Version of Amphitryon by Heinrich von Kleist (2000)
• Eclipse (2000)
• Shroud (2002)
• Dublin 1742 (performed 2002 in The Ark, Dublin; a play for 9-14 year olds; unpublished)
• Prague Pictures: Portrait Of A City (2003)
• The Sea, (2005)
• Love In The Wars (adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea, 2005)
• Christine Falls (crime novel published as Benjamin Black, 2006)

Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (October 18, 1777 – November 21, 1811) was a German poet, dramatist and novelist. ... The Focus Theatre in Dublin is a small but respected theater which offers a variety of plays from new and established writers. ... The Untouchable is a 1997 novel by Irish author John Banville. ... The Sea is the eighteenth novel by John Banville. ... In Greek mythology, Penthesilea (also spelled Penthesilia) was an Amazonian queen, daughter of Ares and Otrera, sister of Hippolyte, Antiope and Melanippe. ...

Further reading

• John Banville, a critical study by Joseph McMinn; Gill and MacMillan; ISBN 0-7171-1803-7
• The Supreme Fictions of John Banville by Joseph McMinn; (October 1999); Manchester University Press; ISBN 0-7190-5397-8
• John Banville: A Critical Introduction by Rüdiger Imhoff (October 1998) Irish American Book Co; ISBN 0-86327-582-6
• John Banville: Exploring Fictions by Derek Hand; (June 2002); Liffey Press; ISBN 1-904148-04-2
• Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies: Special Issue John Banville Edited by Derek Hand; (June 2006)

External links

• Aosdána biographical note
• 1990 audio interview of John Banville, 35 min 31 s, RealAudio
• As clear as mirror glass. John Banville in interview with Three Monkeys Online Magazine
• John Banville at www.contemporarywriters.com
• John Banville at the Internet Book List
• The Dubliner Magazine