Banville, John (1945-…), an Irish novelist, won the 2005 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sea (2005). The prize, now known as the Booker Prize, is the most important literary award in the United Kingdom. Banville’s novel The Book of Evidence (1989) had been a finalist for the 1989 prize. Banville is known for his rich prose style and his experimental approach to form in his novels. Most of his novels are narrated by articulate men who blur the line between reality and fiction. Critics have compared Banville’s complex narratives and use of symbolism to the works of the experimental Irish-born writers James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.
The Sea tells about a widower who returns to the seaside village where he spent his summers as a youth. The Book of Evidence follows the life of a former scientist named Freddie Montgomery, whose attempt to steal a painting leads to murder. The book is the first in a loosely connected trilogy of novels that also includes Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995). Freddie Montgomery also appears in Banville’s novel Singularities (2022).
Banville’s first published work was a collection of nine short stories and a short novel called Long Lankin (1970, revised 1984). His first novel was Nightspawn (1971), a story of political intrigue, romance, and murder set in Greece. Birchwood (1973) is a melodramatic novel about a young man who travels throughout Ireland seeking a sister who may not even exist. Banville next wrote two historical novels about famous scientists, Doctor Copernicus (1976) and Kepler (1981). The short novel The Newton Letter (1982) deals with a scholar who spends a summer in Ireland trying to finish a book about the great English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton.
In Mefisto (1986), the narrator, Gabriel Swan, is obsessed with numbers. Swan searches for order and harmony in the world, despite the influence of an evil character named Felix. Banville based The Untouchable (1997) on the life of the British art historian Anthony Blunt, who was exposed in 1979 as a spy for the Soviet Union. Eclipse (2000) is a kind of ghost story about the mental disintegration of a Shakespearean actor. Shroud (2002) is a study in identity that focuses on the relationship between a university scholar and a mentally unstable young woman.
Banville was born on Dec. 8, 1945, in Wexford, Ireland. Banville was a copyeditor for the Irish Press in Dublin from 1969 to 1983. He became an editor for The Irish Times in 1986 and served as the newspaper’s literary editor from 1988 to 1999. Under the name Benjamin Black, Banville has written several detective novels that feature a Dublin pathologist (specialist in diseases) called Quirke.
