John Banville

John Banville (Wexford, Ireland, 1945) has obtained important literary accolades, such as the Man Booker Prize 2005 and the Irish Book Award for The Sea (Picador, 2005), a work that marked a turning point in his career and his international projection. Banville also works the crime genre under the pen name Benjamin Black, with a precise and seductive prose with Doctor Quirke as its protagonist.

In 2011, he won the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize, considered by many as a Nobel Prize augury, and in 2013 he received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature. In Spain he has won the Leteo and Liber awards and in the year 2014 was honoured with the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature for his “intelligent, profound and original narrative creation and for his alter ego, Benjamin Black, author of unsettling and critical detective novels”.

With his latest novel, The Blue Guitar (Penguin, 2015), The Guardian ranked him as “one of contemporary literature’s finest and most expert witnesses”.

Update: 19/12/2016 12:00 am