John Banville
John Banville
William John Banville, who writes as John Banville and sometimes as Benjamin Black, is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter. Recognised for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators, Banville is considered to be "one of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today." He has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov."...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 December 1945
CountryIreland
the public adulation for Saturday was worrying because here was a 9/11 book that everyone was praising to the sky, making into a bestseller, and it was not a good book for McEwan, who is a very, very good writer. But maybe I shouldn't have been so pompous.
This is a great surprise and a great pleasure. Any one of these books could have won. To my colleagues I say just hang around and it will come. I have hung around for many years.
I have this fantasy. I'm walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.
The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.
I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
I am the worst judge of my books.
It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.
With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
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.
I sometimes think that I might be slightly autistic. There might be a syndrome that hasn't been named. I don't seem to see the world in the same way that most people I know see it. They don't seem to be baffled by it.
I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
I wonder about the wisdom of doing the review. Sometimes I wish I hadn't. Some people saw it as one novelist giving a kicking to another and that's not what I intended.
I thought it was remarkable on his part to be so generous.