John Banville

John Banville
Born	8 December 1945 (1945-12-08) Wexford, Ireland
Pen name	Benjamin Black
Occupation	novelist and screenwriter
Notable work(s)	The Book of Evidence The Untouchable The Sea The Infinities Eclipse
Influences James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Heinrich von Kleist

John Banville (born 8 December 1945) is an Irish novelist and screenwriter.

Banville's breakthrough 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. He was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011. He also writes crime fiction under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.

Banville is known for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators. His stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".

He is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Biography

He was born William John Banville in Wexford, Ireland to Agnes (née Doran) and Martin Banville, a garage clerk. He 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. His sister Anne Veronica "Vonnie" Banville-Evans has written both a children's novel and a reminiscence of growing up in Wexford.

Banville was educated at a Christian Brothers school and at St Peter's College, Wexford. Despite having intended to be a painter and an architect he did not attend university. Banville has described this as "A great mistake. I should have gone. I regret not taking that four years of getting drunk and falling in love. But I wanted to get away from my family. I wanted to be free." Alternately he has stated that college would have had little benefit for him - "I don’t think I would have learned much more, and I don’t think I would have had the nerve to tackle some of the things I tackled as a young writer if I had been to university—I would have been beaten into 
submission by my lecturers." After school he worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus which allowed him to travel at deeply discounted rates. He took advantage of this to travel in Greece and Italy. He lived in the United States during 1968 and 1969. On his return to Ireland he became a sub-editor at the Irish Press, rising eventually to the position of chief sub-editor. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970.

After the Irish Press collapsed in 1995, he became a sub-editor at The Irish Times. 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. In 1984, he was elected to the Irish arts association, Aosdána, but resigned in 2001 so that some other artist might be allowed to receive the cnuas (annuity). He described himself in an interview with Argentine paper La Nacíón, as a West Brit. Banville also writes crime fiction under the pen name Benjamin Black, beginning with Christine Falls (2006). He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

When The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize, Banville said a friend whom he described as "a gentleman of the turf", instructed him "to bet on the other five shortlistees, saying it was a sure thing, since if I won the prize I would have the prize-money, and if I lost one of the others would win . . .But the thing baffled me and I never placed the bets. I doubt I'll be visiting Ladbrokes any time soon".

In 2011, Banville was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. Marcel Reich-Ranicki and John Calder featured on the jury. The award was worth $10,000. According to The Guardian, Banville described the award "one of the ones one really wants to get. It's an old style prize and as an old codger it's perfect for me ... I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent" and said his bronze statuette trophy "will glare at me from the mantelpiece". Wondering while receiving congratulations from Roddy Doyle what sort of prize Kafka would have given had he been alive, Doyle said "It wouldn't have stayed still on the mantelpiece."

Private life

Banville has two adult sons with 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. Dunham described him during the writing process as being like "a murderer who's just come back from a particularly bloody killing". Banville has two daughters from his relationship with Patricia Quinn, former head of the Arts Council of Ireland.

Banville has a strong interest in animal rights, and is often featured in Irish media speaking out against vivisection in Irish university research.^{[citation needed]}

In 2011, he offered to donate his brain to The Little Museum of Dublin "so visitors could marvel at how small it was".

Style

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 described his work "dangerous and clear-running prose"; Val Nolan in The Sunday Business Post calls his style "lyrical, fastidious, and occasionally hilarious"; The 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." Banville himself has admitted that he is "trying to blend poetry and fiction into some new form". Banville is known for his dark humour, and sharp, wintery wit.

Banville has written two trilogies; The first The Revolutions Trilogy, focused on great men of science and consisted of Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and The Newton Letter. The second unnamed trilogy consisted of The Book of Evidence, Ghosts and Athena, and focused on the power of works of art.

Banville is highly scathing of all of his work, stating of his books "I hate them all ... I loathe them. They're all a standing embarrassment." Instead of dwelling on the past Banville is continually looking forward; "You have to crank yourself up every morning and think about all the awful stuff you did yesterday, and how you can compensate for that by doing better today.". He writes only about a hundred words a day for his literary novels, versus several thousand words a day for his Benjamin Black crime fiction. He appreciates his work as Black as a craft, while as Banville he is an artist, though he does consider crime-writing, in his own words, as being "cheap fiction".

“

Sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon if I’m feeling a little bit sleepy, Black will sort of lean in over Banville’s shoulder and start writing. Or Banville will lean over Black’s shoulder and say ‘Oh that’s an interesting sentence, let’s play with that.’ I can see sometimes, revising the work, the points at which one crept in or the two sides seeped into each other.

”

Vladimir Nabokov, a writer to whom Banville is often compared, is an influence of his, stating, "I love Nabokov’s work, and I love his style". Banville is highly influenced by Heinrich von Kleist, having written adaptations of three of his plays (including Amphitrion) and having again used Amphitrion as a basis for his novel The Infinities. One of Banville's earlier influences was James Joyce – "After I'd read the Dubliners, and was struck at the way Joyce wrote about real life, I immediately started writing bad imitations of the Dubliners."

Awards

Year	Prize	Work
1976	James Tait Black Memorial Prize	Doctor Copernicus
1981	Guardian Fiction Prize	Kepler
	Allied Irish Bank Fiction Prize	Kepler
	American-Irish Foundation Award	Birchwood
1989	Guinness Peat Aviation Award	The Book of Evidence
	Booker Prize (shortlisted)	The Book of Evidence
2005	Booker Prize	The Sea
2006	Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year	The Sea
2007	Royal Society of Literature Fellowship
	Prix Madeleine Zepter
2009	Honorary Patronage of the University Philosophical Society
2011	Franz Kafka Prize

Bibliography

Short story collection

• Long Lankin (1970; revised ed.1984)

Novels

John Banville talks about The Infinities on Bookbits radio.

• Nightspawn (1971)
• Birchwood (1973)
• The Revolutions Trilogy :
  • Doctor Copernicus: A Novel (1976)
  • Kepler, a Novel (1981)
  • The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982)
• Mefisto (1986)
• The Book of Evidence (1989)
• Ghosts (1993)
• Athena: A Novel (1995)
• The Ark (1996) (only 260 copies published)
• The Untouchable (1997)
• Eclipse (2000)
• Shroud (2002)
• Prague Pictures: Portrait Of A City (2003)
• The Sea (2005)
• The Infinities (2009)

Plays

• The Broken Jug: After Heinrich von Kleist (1994)
• Seachange (performed 1994 in the Focus Theatre, Dublin; unpublished)
• Dublin 1742 (performed 2002 in The Ark, Dublin; a play for 9–14 year olds; unpublished)
• God's Gift: A Version of Amphitryon by Heinrich von Kleist (2000)
• Love In The Wars (adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea, 2005)
• Conversation In The Mountains (radio play, forthcoming 2008)

As "Benjamin Black"

• Christine Falls (2006)
• The Silver Swan (2007)
• The Lemur (2008, previously serialised in The New York Times)
• Elegy for April (2010)
• A Death In Summer (2011)

Book Reviews

• "The Family Pinfold" The New York Review of Books 54/11 (28 June 2007) : 20–21 [reviews Alexander Waugh, Fathers and Sons : the Autobiography of a Family]
• "Trump Cards" Bookforum (Dec/Jan 2010) : John Banville on The Original of Laura, Nabokov's final, unfinished novel.

Screenwriter

Year	Title	Reference
1984	Reflections (Adaptation of The Newton Letter for TV)
1994	Seascapes (TV Film)
1999	The Last September
2011	Albert Nobbs
2011	Be Crazy For Me And My Father
2012?	The Sea

Further reading

• John Banville by John Kenny; Irish Academic Press (2009); ISBN 0-7165-2909-1
• 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)
• Irish Writers on Writing featuring John Banville. Edited by Eavan Boland (Trinity University Press, 2007).

External links

• Aosdána biographical note
• Belinda McKeon (Spring 2009). "John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200". Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5907/the-art-of-fiction-no-200-john-banville. 
• "As clear as mirror glass. John Banville in interview" with Three Monkeys Online Magazine
• 2011 radio interview at The Bat Segundo Show
• John Banville at Contemporary Writers
• John Banville at the Internet Book List
• John Banville at Ricorso Irish Writers Database
• John Banville interview with the Village Voice about Benjamin Black
• Chapter 1 of The Sinking City
• Banville author page and article archive from The New York Review of Books
• "Banville scored an own goal even before our crime fiction spat" (9 August 2009)—Article by Ruth Dudley Edwards about Banville
• John Banville's BBC radio plays
• Benjamin Black's Official Website
• Benjamin Black's Books on Macmillan.com