John Banville
1945 -
John Banville, a native of Wexford, is one of Ireland's leading novelists. A renowned prose stylist, he won the Booker Prize in 2005 for The Sea, having been shortlisted in 1989 for The Book of Evidence. He worked as a clerk with Aer Lingus in the 1960s, before becoming a subeditor, first with the Irish Press and then with the Irish Times. He was literary editor at the Irish Times from 1988 to 1999. His first book, Long Lankin, a collection of short stories, was published in 1970. His first novel, Nightspawn, came out in 1971. Subsequent novels include a trilogy inspired by great scientists, Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1980), The Newton Letter (1982). The latter was filmed for Channel 4 television as Reflections. As well as the Booker Prize, Banville has won the Allied Irish Banks Fiction Prize, the American-Irish Foundation Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize. Since 2006, he has written a series of crime novels set largely in 1950s Dublin under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. A BBC series based on the novels was produced in 2013.