William John Banville was born on December 8, 1945. He is an Irish novelist, screenwriter, and adapter of plays. He was once a member of Aosdána, an organization that supports Irish artists, but he chose to give up his financial support in 2001 to help a less wealthy writer.
Banville began writing books in 1970 with a collection of short stories. His first novels followed soon after. Between 1976 and 1982, he wrote the "Revolutions Trilogy," a series of books named after famous scientists: Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, and The Newton Letter. His book Mefisto, which has a mathematical theme, is the fourth book in the "Scientific Tetralogy" when combined with the three books from the "Revolutions Trilogy." In 1989, he wrote The Book of Evidence, which started the "Frames Trilogy," a series about art. The trilogy was completed with Ghosts and Athena in the 1990s. Scholars studied his early works in the late 20th century, including books by Rüdiger Imhof, Joseph McMinn, and others.
Banville won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1976 for Doctor Copernicus. He also received the International Nonino Prize in 2003. His thirteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005, which brought him greater recognition worldwide. In 2007, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He received other honors, including the Franz Kafka Prize from Czechia in 2011, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2013, and the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature from Spain in 2014. In 2017, Italy named him a Cavaliere (knight) of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia. He was born and raised in Wexford, Ireland, and currently lives in Howth, Dublin. He has been considered a possible winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Before becoming a full-time writer, Banville worked for 30 years in the Irish newspaper industry. He was the literary editor of The Irish Times from 1988 to 1999. Later in life, he wrote crime novels under the name Benjamin Black. These books are set in 1950s Dublin and feature an Irish pathologist named Quirke. In 2020, he published an alternative history novel, The Secret Guests, under the name B. W. Black.
Early life
William John Banville was born to Agnes (née Doran) and Martin Banville, a garage clerk, in Wexford, Ireland. He was the youngest of three siblings. His older brother, Vincent, is also a novelist who writes under the name Vincent Lawrence and his own name. Their sister, Anne Veronica "Vonnie" Banville-Evans, wrote a children's book and a memoir about growing up in Wexford.
Banville attended CBS Primary School in Wexford, which was run by Christian Brothers, and later studied at St. Peter's College in Wexford. Although he wanted to become a painter and an architect, he did not go to university. This choice was partly because he wanted to leave his family, but he later said it was a "great mistake" to miss "four years of getting drunk and falling in love." However, he also believed that university would not have helped him much at the time and doubted he would have had the courage to complete some of his early writings if he had been "beaten into submission by my lecturers." As a teenager, he stole a collection of poems by Dylan Thomas from Wexford County Library.
After finishing school, Banville worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus, which gave him the chance to travel at very low prices. He used this opportunity to visit Greece and Italy. In 1969, he began working as a sub-editor at The Irish Press, and later worked as a sub-editor at The Irish Times. In 1988, he became the literary editor of The Irish Times, a position he held until 1999.
Personal life
In 1969, Banville married Janet Dunham, an American artist who worked with fabric. They met in San Francisco the year before when she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. The couple had two sons together. Their marriage ended when Banville had a romantic relationship outside of marriage with a neighbor named Patricia Quinn. Quinn later became the director of the Arts Council of Ireland. Banville and Quinn had two daughters, born around 1990 and 1997. Although they separated, Banville and Dunham did not get divorced. Banville said they stayed "on good terms." Dunham passed away at Blackrock Clinic on November 22, 2021. After her death, Banville said he experienced "brain fog," which made it hard for him to write for six months. In a 2024 interview, he expressed regret for his past actions, saying: "I caused Janet such anguish. I caused Patricia Quinn such anguish. I was not a good parent. I was not a good person. I was selfish. But I have to take responsibility."
Writing
Banville writes in the Hiberno-English language and is worried about losing this skill if he moved abroad, as many other Irish writers have done. He has said he is trying to mix poetry and fiction into a new kind of writing.
Banville published his first book, a collection of short stories called Long Lankin, in 1970. His first novel, Nightspawn, he did not like and called it "crotchety, posturing, absurdly pretentious."
In the 1980s, when he was not well known, he visited Dublin’s bookstores around the time his novel Kepler was released. He noticed that none of his books were in the stores. However, in 2012, he said he did not feel upset because he was writing the kinds of books he wanted to write. He also said it was his own choice if his books were not selling well, and no one else was responsible.
Banville has written three sets of three books, called trilogies. The first trilogy, the Revolutions Trilogy, focuses on important scientists and includes Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), and The Newton Letter (1982). He became interested in scientists like Kepler after reading Arthur Koestler’s book The Sleepwalkers. He realized that, like himself, scientists try to create order in their work.
The second trilogy, called the Frames Trilogy, includes The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), and Athena (1995). These books often have characters who are not reliable and explore the power of art. The third trilogy, published from 2000 onward, includes Eclipse, Shroud, and Ancient Light. These books follow the characters Alexander and Cass Cleave.
Banville has compared writing to the life of an athlete. He said, "It’s asking a lot of yourself. Every day, you have to do your best—it’s like being a sportsman. You have to perform at your best for six, seven, or eight hours a day, and that is very tiring." His usual writing day starts with a drive from his home in Dublin to his office by the river. He writes from 9 a.m. until lunch. After lunch, he eats bread, cheese, and tea, then works until 6 p.m. He writes at two desks placed at right angles, one facing a wall and the other facing a window he does not clean.
Since 1990, Banville has written for The New York Review of Books. In 2008, he was asked if his books had been translated into Irish. He said no one would do so and that people sometimes call him "a West Brit" in a negative way. He advises young writers not to ask him for help, saying, "They are on their own, with no help available anywhere."
Banville is very critical of his own books, saying, "I hate them all… I loathe them. They’re all a standing embarrassment." He prefers to focus on the future, saying, "You have to think about the bad things you did yesterday and try to do better today." He does not read reviews of his work because he already knows its flaws.
He wrote about John McGahern, who lost his job due to controversy involving a relationship with a foreign woman. In 2006, Banville received a call saying, "John Banville is dead." After checking, he realized it was John McGahern who had died. Banville also wrote about Caravaggio’s painting The Taking of Christ for the book Lines of Vision, published in 2014.
He contributed to Sons+Fathers, a book published in 2015 to support the Irish Hospice Foundation.
Starting with Christine Falls (2006), Banville wrote crime fiction under the name Benjamin Black. He writes these books faster and with less care than his other novels, calling them "cheap fiction." He writes crime books on a computer, taking three to four months for each, and writes his other novels with a fountain pen, taking two to five years.
The main character in the Quirke series is a pathologist in 1950s Dublin. The first three books—Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007), and Elegy for April (2011)—were made into a TV series called Quirke, which aired in Ireland and later in the UK. Later books in the series include A Death in Summer (2011), Vengeance (2012), Holy Orders (2013), Even the Dead (2016), April in Spain (2021), The Lock-Up (2023), and The Drowned (2024). The last three books were published under Banville’s own name. A related book, Snow (2020), features a character named Detective Inspector St John Strafford, who also appears in April in Spain and The Lock-Up.
Other crime books written under the name Benjamin Black include The Lemur (2008), The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014), and Prague Nights (2017).
The Secret Guests (2020) is a crime book based on an alternate history where British princesses Elizabeth and Margaret are sent to Ireland in 1940 to avoid danger. This book, which also features St John Strafford, was published under the name B. W. Black.
Style
Critics consider Banville an expert in writing style, with his work described as carefully written and impressive. He is compared to Proust through Nabokov and is known for his dark humor and clever wordplay.
Michael Ross said Banville might be the only living writer who can improve fiction beyond what Beckett achieved. Gerry Dukes, who reviewed Banville’s book The Sea in The Irish Independent, called him a "lord of language."
In an interview with The Paris Review, Banville said he admired Vladimir Nabokov’s style. However, he noted that he found something unusual about it, which he later understood when Nabokov admitted he was tone deaf. Banville has adapted three plays by Heinrich von Kleist, including Amphitryon, and used the story of Amphitryon as the basis for his novel The Infinities.
As a boy, Banville copied the writing style of James Joyce after reading Dubliners. A profile in The Guardian stated that Banville believes all Irish writers follow either Joyce or Beckett, and he places himself in the Beckett group. However, in a 2012 interview with Noah Charney, Banville said W. B. Yeats and Henry James were the real influences on his work. When asked about Fyodor Dostoevsky and Albert Camus, Banville said, "Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously… Ditto Camus."
Philosophy
He describes himself as "extremely afraid of air travel," worried about "the plane crashing while the engines and passengers scream loudly."
Banville has often talked about and written about his respect for women.
He supports women's rights and has welcomed the slow progress in his home country over his lifetime. During this time, Ireland changed from a place controlled by the Roman Catholic Church, where women had few job opportunities and faced limits on access to birth control, to a place where women's roles became more valued, and where a woman could take over as president from another woman, a position once only held by men. About women in his own writing, Banville told Niamh Horan of the Sunday Independent in 2012: "I do not see a difference between men and women. To me, they are just people." Horan noted that Banville has a "unique ability to write about women and explore their thoughts and feelings."
Banville wrote the introduction for a fifty-year collection of Edna O'Brien's work, The Love Object: Selected Stories, praising her as "one of the most skilled writers working today" and pointing out how few contemporary writers could match O'Brien's ability to write with both immediacy and deep understanding. He noted that O'Brien's characters are "remarkably portrayed" and acknowledged that all her characters "are somehow affected by the world, especially by the world of men." Banville concluded by calling O'Brien "simply one of the greatest writers of our time."
Banville worked on writing a screenplay based on Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Last September. At the time, Bowen's work was not widely read; Vintage published new editions of her novels and Hermione Lee's biography of her to coincide with the release. Banville later wrote the introduction for her Collected Stories.
Banville was close to literary editor Caroline Walsh and expressed deep sadness when he learned of her death. He dedicated his book Ancient Light to her. Similarly, Banville was close to Eileen Battersby, and at her funeral, he was moved to tears while reciting a poem in her memory.
In a 2012 interview with Niamh Horan, Banville shared his views on harm and responsibility: "Hurting other people is the worst thing you can do. Being hurt yourself is bad enough, but hurting others is unforgivable… I think we must take responsibility for our lives and for both our good and bad actions. We must be responsible… Failure in art, or in earning a living, or even success—none of these matters as much as hurting others, because life is short and difficult, and we have a duty to be kind to others."
Ben, a Labrador dog, lived to be 11 years old before dying from cancer at Christmas 1980. Many years later, Banville still thought of Ben as "a lost friend," and sometimes Ben appeared in his dreams, sniffing and sighing, as if wondering why there were no more walks. Banville said this may sound emotional, but it did not feel that way to him.
On August 21, 2017, the RTÉ Radio 1 weekday afternoon show Liveline discussed a report about Trinity College Dublin's use of 100,000 animals for scientific research over the past four years. A listener mentioned that Banville had previously raised this issue but was ignored. Banville called the radio show directly to call the practice "absolutely disgraceful" and shared the story of how he had seen women protesting about it.
When asked if he received support for his views in the letter he sent to The Irish Times, he replied:
This was an unusual moment for Banville, showing a different side of him, as he admitted when asked if he had a history of opposing activities like blood sport.
Awards and honours
In 1981, John Banville wrote a letter to The Guardian suggesting that the Booker Prize, for which he had been "runner-up to the shortlist of contenders," be awarded to him. He proposed using the prize money to buy every copy of the longlisted books in Ireland and donate them to libraries. He believed this would ensure the books were not only purchased but also read, an idea he called "a unique occurrence."
When his novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize, Banville said a friend—whom he called "a gentleman of the turf"—advised him to bet on the other five shortlisted authors. The friend claimed it was a sure thing, as Banville would win the prize and receive the money, or one of the others would win. Banville found the idea confusing and did not place the bets. He later joked that he would not visit a betting shop again.
Banville was not shortlisted for the Booker Prize again until 2005, when his novel The Sea was selected. It was shortlisted alongside books by Julian Barnes, Sebastian Barry, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ali Smith, and Zadie Smith. John Sutherland, chairman of the judges, had previously praised Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday in a review. Banville, however, criticized Saturday in The New York Review of Books, saying McEwan’s work showed "a disturbing tendency toward mellowness." Anne Haverty later called Banville’s critique "devastatingly effective." Sutherland responded to Banville’s review with a letter signed as "Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus," accusing him of misreading a scene involving a game of squash in the novel. Banville replied, beginning with the line: "Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the Department of Trivia," and apologized for his "sluggish comprehension" after reading Sutherland’s letter. He later admitted he thought he might "kiss the Booker goodbye" after reading Sutherland’s response.
At the 2005 award ceremony, BBC Two’s Kirsty Wark asked literary editors Jan Dalley, Suzi Feay, and Robert McCrum about the shortlisted books. Banville, Barry, and Ali Smith were not considered as strong contenders, and much of the discussion focused on Barnes, Ishiguro, and Zadie Smith. The judges’ vote was split between Banville and Ishiguro, with Rick Gekoski supporting Banville. Sutherland cast the deciding vote in favor of Banville. Banville later said he had "not been the most popular person in London literary circles over the past half-year" and called it "very large of Sutherland to cast the winning vote in my favor."
Later, when the Booker Prize rules changed to allow entries by American writers, Banville welcomed the idea at first. However, he later expressed regret, saying the prize had "lost that uniqueness" and should "revert" to its original form.
In 2011, Banville was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. Marcel Reich-Ranicki and John Calder were members of the jury. Banville said he had been "wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent" and joked that his bronze statuette would "glare at me from the mantelpiece." He called the award "one of the ones one really wants to get" and said it was "perfect for me" as an "old codger."
On the day the 2019 and 2018 Booker Prize winners were announced, a man claiming to be Mats Malm, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, called Banville. He said Banville had won the Nobel Prize, read the customary citation, and asked if he would prefer to be named the 2018 or 2019 laureate. Banville was at a physiotherapy appointment when the call came and informed his daughter, who called him back during the live announcement to say his name was not mentioned. Banville then told everyone he had spoken to: "Don’t buy the champagne, stop throwing your hats in the air."
A later voicemail from the man claiming to be Malm said the Swedish Academy had withdrawn Banville’s prize due to a disagreement. Banville felt sorry for the man, saying he "sounded upset" and was "a very good actor." However, Banville compared the voice on the call to a YouTube recording of the real Malm and noticed the speaker’s voice was deeper and that Malm had a better grasp of English. Banville urged the Swedish Academy to investigate the incident, saying it was "aimed at damaging the Academy" and that he was "collateral damage." The real Malm called the incident a "bad joke," and fellow Academy member Per Wästberg also thought it was a "joke." Banville later said the hoax was not targeted at him but at a member of the Academy involved in gender studies. He provided the recording to the Swedish Academy to help with its investigation.
Banville handled the hoax with dignity. The Sunday Independent described him as "as dignified and eloquent as ever" despite the global attention the incident received. He told The Observer: "There is some comedy in it and potential material: 'The man who nearly won the Nobel prize.'" Irish media called the trick "cruel," while English media called it "deceitful." Banville received many supportive messages and calls from fellow writers.