“When I started writing, I was a
great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one
gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing:
you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and
memories. It's richer, in a way.” – John Banville
Irish writer John Banville, born on this
day in 1945, has been labeled "one of the most imaginative literary
novelists writing in the English language today" by The Washington Post, which also termed him “Ireland’s Wordsmith.”
Considered
a serious contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Banville has
already won numerous awards, including The Booker Prize for The Sea and the
Guinness Peat Aviation Award for The Book of Evidence. In 2011, Banville
was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, and in 2013 the Irish PEN Award, both for
his life’s body of work.
Sometimes termed “a dark writer,” Banville's
stated
ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness
that poetry has.” Banville also is a noted crime writer (as Benjamin Black), and a journalist -- writing for The New York Review of Books, The Irish Press and
The Irish Times,
where he became literary editor in 1998.
Considered by critics
as a master stylist of English, his writing has been described as perfectly
crafted, beautiful, and dazzling. David Mehegan of the Boston Globe
calls him "one of the great stylists writing in English today. Banville himself said that he is "trying
to blend poetry and fiction into some new form.”
“I want my art to make people look
at the world in a new way,” he said. “I mean, what's the point of the art of
writing if it doesn't take you into the mysterious?”
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