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John Banville was born in Wexford
in 1945 and was educated in Wexford. On leaving school he worked
for Aer Lingus as a clerk and started his journalistic career
as a sub-editor on the ‘Irish Press’ and later became
the literary editor of the ‘Irish Times’ and is still
a prolific reviewer in this newspaper.
Banville's fictional portrait of the 15th century
Polish astronomer Dr Copernicus won the James Tait Black Memorial
Prize and was the first in a series of books exploring the lives
of eminent scientists and scientific and philosophical ideas.
John Banville is a philosophical novelist and as an artist is
concerned with the nature of perception, the conflict between
imagination and reality and the existential isolation of the individual.
These themes are explored in Kepler and
The Newton Letter. Mefisto explores the world
of numbers in a reworking of Dr Faustus. The Book of Evidence
won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award and was also short-listed
for the Booker Prize. This was followed by five more novels, Ghosts,
The Untouchable, Eclipse and Shroud. Banville finally achieved
Booker glory in 2005 with his novel The Sea. The beautifully
crafted prose in The Sea has led to Banville being heralded
as one of the greatest fictional stylists of our time.
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