John Banville: Lifetime Achievement Award

John Banville will be honored at this year’s Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award for 2013. The award will be presented at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards ceremony on Tuesday November 26, 2013.

Born in Wexford in 1945, John Banville published his first book, the short-story collection Long Lankin, at the age of twenty-five and has since published a novel almost every three years; thirteen under his own name and, more recently, five under the pen name Benjamin Black.

Following the early novels, he wrote two acclaimed trilogies: the first, consisting of Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), and The Newton Letter (1982), focused on men of science; the second, with The Book of Evidence(1989), Ghosts (1993), and Athena (1995), took the world of art as its touchstone. Doctor Copernicus won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Kepler the Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Book of Evidence the Guinness Peat Aviation Award. The Book of Evidence was also short-listed for the Booker Prize, an award that Banville won in 2005 for his novel of childhood and memory, The Sea.

Writing as Benjamin Black, Banville has published several crime novels featuring Irish detective Quirke.  Watch John Banville aka Benjamin Black interview here!