59 Facts About John Banville

William John Banville was born on 8 December 1945 and is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter.

John Banville was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.

John Banville is a former member of Aosdana, having voluntarily relinquished the financial stipend in 2001 to another, more impoverished, writer.

John Banville was born and grew up in Wexford town in south-east Ireland.

John Banville is considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

William John Banville was born to Agnes and Martin Banville, a garage clerk, in Wexford, Ireland.

John Banville is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own.

John Banville stole a collection of Dylan Thomas's poetry from Wexford County Library while in his teens.

John Banville was educated at CBS Primary, Wexford, a Christian Brothers school, and at St Peter's College, Wexford.

John Banville took advantage of these rates to travel in Greece and Italy.

The Irish Times, too, endured financial troubles, and John Banville was offered the choice of taking a redundancy package or working as a features department sub-editor.

John Banville has two sons from a marriage to the American textile artist Janet Dunham, whom he met in the United States during the 1960s.

John Banville later went on to have two daughters from another relationship.

John Banville published his first book, a collection of short stories titled Long Lankin, in 1970.

John Banville has disowned his first published novel, Nightspawn, describing it as "crotchety, posturing, absurdly pretentious".

Since 1990, John Banville has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.

John Banville has written three trilogies: the first, The Revolutions Trilogy, focused on great men of science and consisted of Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, and The Newton Letter.

John Banville said he became interested in Kepler and other men of science after reading Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers.

John Banville realised that, like him, scientists were trying to impose order in their work.

John Banville wrote fondly of John McGahern, who lost his job amid condemnation by his workplace and the Catholic Church for becoming intimately involved with a foreign woman.

However, John Banville was aware that McGahern had been unwell and, having performed the necessary checks to ensure that he was still alive, concluded that it was McGahern who was dead instead.

John Banville writes his Benjamin Black crime fiction much more quickly than he composes his literary novels.

John Banville appreciates his work as Black as a craft, while as Banville he is an artist.

John Banville considers crime writing, in his own words, as being "cheap fiction".

John Banville replied that nobody would translate them and that he was often referred to pejoratively as a West Brit.

John Banville wrote an account of Caravaggio's 1602 painting The Taking of Christ for the book Lines of Vision, released in 2014 to mark the 150th anniversary of the National Gallery of Ireland.

John Banville provided a contribution to Sons+Fathers, a book published in 2015 to provide funds for the Irish Hospice Foundation's efforts to give care to terminally ill patients within their own homes.

John Banville's typical writing day begins with a drive from his home in Dublin to his office by the river.

John Banville writes on two desks at right angles to each other, one facing a wall and the other facing a window through which he has no view and never cleans.

John Banville advises against young writers approaching him for advice: "I remind them as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere".

John Banville is considered by critics as a master stylist of English, and his writing has been described as perfectly crafted, beautiful, dazzling.

John Banville is known for his dark humour, and sharp, wintery wit.

John Banville has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov".

Michael Ross has stated that John Banville is "perhaps the only living writer capable of advancing fiction beyond the point reached by Beckett".

John Banville has said that he is "trying to blend poetry and fiction into some new form".

John Banville writes in the Hiberno-English dialect and dreads this being lost if he were to move abroad as other Irish writers have done.

Four of John Banville's novels have featured the trope of a character's eyes darting back and forth "like a spectator at a tennis match".

John Banville considers himself to be "incurably terrified of air travel", fearing "the plane going down amid the terrible shrieking of engines and passengers".

John Banville has often spoken and written of his admiration for women.

John Banville contributed the introduction to Edna O'Brien's The Love Object: Selected Stories, praising her as "one of the most sophisticated writers now at work" and noting how it was "hard to think of any contemporary writer who could match [O'Brien's] combination of immediacy and sympathetic recall".

John Banville noted how "striking" is the figuring of O'Brien's characters and acknowledged that all her characters "are in some way damaged by the world, and specifically by the world of men".

John Banville concluded by describing O'Brien as "simply one of the finest writers of our time".

Close to the literary editor Caroline Walsh, John Banville spoke of his devastation upon learning of her death.

Likewise, John Banville was close to Eileen Battersby, at whose funeral he was moved to tears whilst reciting a poem in her memory.

On 21 August 2017, the RTE Radio 1 weekday afternoon show Liveline was discussing a report on Trinity College Dublin's use of 100,000 animals to conduct scientific research over the previous four years when a listener pointed out that John Banville had previously raised the matter but been ignored.

John Banville personally telephoned Liveline to call the practice "absolutely disgraceful" and told the tale of how he had come upon some women protesting:.

Some lady professor from Trinity wrote back essentially saying Mr John Banville should stick to his books and leave us scientists to our valuable work.

John Banville was not shortlisted for the Booker Prize again until 2005 when his novel The Sea was selected.

John Banville later admitted that, upon reading Sutherland's letter, he had thought: "[W]ell, I can kiss the Booker goodbye".

John Banville was attending a physiotherapy appointment at the time and was lying face down on a couch when the call came.

John Banville had retained a mobile telephone nearby, should he be contacted to give his view on a possible Irish winner.

John Banville informed his daughter; she called her father back while watching the live announcement at midday to tell him his name had not been mentioned.

John Banville telephoned everyone he had spoken to in the intervening period to tell them: "Don't buy the champagne, stop throwing your hats in the air".

John Banville felt sorry for the man purporting to be Malm: "He certainly sounded upset, he was a very good actor".

However, when John Banville rang the number back, he found himself in contact with the offices of the Swedish Academy.

John Banville called upon the Swedish Academy to investigate the incident "because I don't think the hoax was aimed at me, I think it was aimed at damaging the Academy or one or two members of the Academy".

John Banville provided the recording to the Swedish Academy to assist its investigation.

John Banville responded well in spite the hoax; he was described in the Sunday Independent as being "as dignified and eloquent as ever in the face of a disappointment that made headlines around the world" and told The Observer: "There is some comedy in it and potential material: 'The man who nearly won the Nobel prize'".

John Banville received numerous sympathetic emails and telephone calls and support from fellow writers.