John Banville

John Banville (born December 8, 1945, Wexford, Ireland) is an Irish novelist and journalist whose fiction is known for being referential, paradoxical, and complex. Common themes throughout his work include loss, obsession, destructive love, and the pain that accompanies freedom. Banville has also published mysteries under the pseudonym Benjamin Black as well as his own name.

Early life

Banville attended St. Peter’s College in Wexford, Ireland. He was inspired to become a writer after reading James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) when he was 13, later calling it a book that taught him that “fiction could be about the essence of life.” He began working in Dublin as a copy editor for the Irish Press (1969–83). He was later a copy editor (1986–88) and literary editor (1988–99) for the Irish Times.

Fiction

Banville’s first piece of fiction, Long Lankin (1970), is a series of nine episodic short stories. This work was followed by two novels: Nightspawn (1971), an intentionally ambiguous narrative, and Birchwood (1973), the story of an aristocratic Irish family in decline. Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), and The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982) are fictional biographies based on the lives of noted scientists. These three works use scientific exploration as a metaphor to question perceptions of fiction and reality. Mefisto (1986) is written from the point of view of a character obsessed with numbers.

The Book of Evidence (1989) is a murder mystery and the first of a trilogy centered on the character Freddie Montgomery. Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995) completed the trilogy. The Untouchable (1997), along with Eclipse (2000) and its sequel, Shroud (2002), are novels that tell more stories of conflicted individuals. The Sea (2005), which was awarded the Booker Prize, tells the story of a widowed art historian who revisits a childhood destination on the sea. The Infinities (2009) is an eccentric work that relates a domestic drama that takes place in a parallel reality through the narrative of the Greek god Hermes, and Ancient Light (2012) uses characters that previously appeared in Eclipse and Shroud to recount an older man’s vivid recollection of his earliest love as a means of coping with his daughter’s suicide. The Blue Guitar (2015) relates the tale of a painter and thief who goes on the lam after an affair with his friend’s wife is discovered. In Mrs. Osmond (2017), Banville offered a sequel to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In 2022 he published the satiric novel The Singularities, a sequel to The Infinities that features many of the characters of his previous books.

Benjamin Black books and mystery series

Banville used the pseudonym Benjamin Black for his crime series featuring the character Quirke, a Dublin pathologist in the 1950s: Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007), Elegy for April (2010), A Death in Summer (2011), Vengeance (2012), Holy Orders (2013), and Even the Dead (2015). The eighth installment, April in Spain (2021), was released under Banville’s name. Other Benjamin Black books include The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014), which features Raymond Chandler’s fictional private detective Philip Marlowe, and the historical crime novels Wolf on a String (2017) and The Secret Guests (2019). The latter introduced the Irish detective St. John Strafford, a Protestant character serving on a mostly Roman Catholic police force. The character led a new crime series, beginning with the novel Snow (2020), published under Banville’s name. Strafford also appeared in April in Spain, and the book is considered to be the second in the Strafford and Quirke series (as well as the eighth in the Quirke series), in which the two popular characters partner up to solve mysteries. The Lock-Up, the third Strafford and Quirke installment, was published in 2023.

In 2024 Banville published The Drowned, in which Strafford and Quirke investigate the sudden disappearance of a woman in a small coastal town.

Other works and honors

Banville also wrote such nonfiction works as Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir (2016). In an interview with The Guardian in 2022, he distinguished between writers of his generation and younger Irish novelists by noting that the newer crop of writers focus more on their own lives and the lives of their friends, adding, “That wasn’t the point at all for my generation; we were interested in what people are, not what they do.” Of his noncrime novels and their characters, he said, “I don’t care who does what; I’m investigating the poetic possibilities of language and trying to address the question of being.”

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe

Banville’s many honors include the Franz Kafka Prize (2011), the Irish PEN Award for outstanding achievement in literature (2013), and Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (2014).