William John Banville (born 8 December 1945), 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."Banville has received numerous awards in his career. His novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award in 1989. His fourteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. In 2011, Banville was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, while 2013 brought both the Irish PEN Award and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. In 2014 he won the Prince of Asturias Award in Letters. He is considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Banville's stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".He has published a number of crime novels as Benjamin Black, most featuring Quirke, an Irish pathologist based in Dublin.
International Dublin Literary Award, Man Booker International Prize, Edgar Award for Best Novel, Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Satellite Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, Macavity Awards for Best Mystery Novel
Movies
The Sea, Albert Nobbs, The Last September
Star Sign
Sagittarius
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Quote
1
I watch these things like The Bridge and so on, but every single one of these shows seems to start off with a young woman being raped, and you know, murdered, and eviscerated, and thrown into a garbage dump, and if I were a woman I would be protesting very loudly about this
2
Nowadays, seeing photographs of Dubai, we of the older generation rub our eyes in amazement. In this city in the desert, the future, that in our young days seemed impossibly far off, or just plain impossible, has already arrived. And - who would have thought? - it is just as dementedly kitschy as anything dreamed up for the covers of "New Worlds" or "Astounding Science Fiction".
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Fact
1
Won the 2005 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sea (his 14th book).
Writer
Title
Year
Status
Character
Riviera
2017
TV Mini-Series co-writer - 1 episode filming
Quirke
TV Mini-Series novel - 1 episode, 2014 based on novel - 1 episode, 2014
$950,000
