Quicknation    John Banville

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is an Irish novelist, born December 8, 1945 in Wexford. He is regarded as one of Ireland's finest writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and a supreme stylist.

His novel, i, was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation Award the same year. His most recent novel, i, won the 2005 Man Booker Prize.

Banville is known for his precise—some would say cold—prose , Nabokovian in inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators.

His father worked in a garage and died when Banville was in his early thirties; his mother was a housewife. Banville is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is also a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own.

Educated at a Christian Brothers' school and at St Peter's College in Wexford, he did not attend university. After school he worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus which allowed him to travel at deeply-discounted rates.

He lived in the United States in 1968-9. On his return to Ireland he became a sub-editor at the Irish Press newspaper, rising eventually to the position of chief sub-editor.

His first book, i, appeared in 1970.

When the Irish Press collapsed in 1995 he became a sub-editor at the Irish Times newspaper. He was appointed literary editor in 1998. The Irish Times, too, suffered severe financial problems and Banville was offered the choice of taking a redundancy package or working as a features department sub-editor. He left.

He has two adult sons, Colm and Douglas, by his first wife, the American textile artist Janet Dunham, whom he met during a visit to San Francisco in 1968 where she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. He has two daughters aged 9 and 16 (in 2005) by his second wife, Patricia Quinn, former head of the Arts Council of Ireland. He lives in central Dublin.

His first wife described him, when he is writing, as being like "a murderer who's just come back from a particularly bloody killing".

He was elected to Aosdána in 1984 but resigned in 2001 so that some other artist might be allowed to receive the i

Mysterious; Compelling; Disdainful; Fastidious; Serious; Aloof; Intellectual snob; Magisterial; Arrogant; Professorial; Withering; Surly; Lugubrious; Solemn; Vain; Awkward; Other-worldly; Cold fish; Pompous boffin; Austere.

Funny; Dry; Sardonic; Barbed wit; A high opinion of his own talents; Warm friendships; Calm presence; Kindly; Droll; A raconteur; Self-deprecating sense of humour; Very pleasant to work with and a stickler for grammar and punctuation but he didn't read newspapers or watch television, so he never knew what was going on in the real world; Stayed to drink tea and read Henry James in his i[My parents were] small people, small, good, decent people, who lived very circumscribed lives. Leaving the nest so early was hard for them and, when I look back now, I realise how cruel I was.(About his father's death) Someone said the best gift a man can give his son is to die young. When you think about it, it's true. I was in my early 30s and I did feel freed by it, awful as it is to confess....those who regard me as effete, arrogant, distanced. [Interviewer: All of which is true, of course.] [Banville:] Of course!I don’t like fiction as a form. I think it’s childish. It’s too coarse. Which is why I’m trying to change it. My modest ambition in life is to change the novel entirely!This book has come out which says that people who know me say I’m ‘prickly and arrogant’. Okay, I am!(His books) ...they're all cold, or so I'm told anyway. I don't find them cold. I find them embarrassingly emotional, throbbing with anguish and aches.I don't understand politics, how it works...I don't understand the intricacies. Power. I don't understand power.I couldn't live on my own...I have to have people around me. Outside the door. I have to know they are outside that door.I now belong to a small band of big Bs - Botticelli, Banville and Beethoven. But not necessarily in that order.(On being reprimanded for a minor factual error in an article, one he dismissed as a technicality) Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the Department of Trivia.(On the Booker Prize) There are plenty of other rewards for middle-brow fiction. There should be one decent prize for real books.(On publicity) We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us. I'm afraid I'm not very demonstrative.) In a note of acknowledgment at the end of the book McEwan names the various doctors who shared their expertise with him, including...the Nabokovianly named Frank T. Vertosick Jr., to whom he is indebted for an account of a transsphenoidal hypophysectomy—yes, there are many big words in this book.(On bitchy reaction to his Booker win among London's literati) If they give me the bloody prize, why can’t they say nice things about me?