Novelist, short story writer, playwright and screenwriter, was born in Wexford on December 8, 1945. He was educated at Christian Brothers' schools and St. Peter's College in Wexford. He has worked in journalism since 1969 and was the literary editor of the Irish Times from 1988 to 1999.

Banville's first book, Long Larkin, consists of nine short stories and the novella, The Possessed. Thematically, the narratives have at least two aspects in common: they feature characters who are caught in the hell of a peculiar guilt, and in each a particular persona acts as the Long Larkin figure, intruding upon human relationships and severing them. Long Larkin was a mason in an old Scottish ballad who, seeking revenge for not having been paid by Lord Wearie, forces his way into the lord's castle and kills Wearie's wife and son. The narratives are grouped with respect to the age of the principal characters - childhood, adolescence, middle age - and the area of public life. Long Lankin, above all on account of the novella (which Banville did not include in the revised edition of 1984), may have certain flaws as a result of Banville's thinking he was being sophisticated when he was not, but the book clearly marked the debut of a major writer.

The title of his first novel, Nightspawn (1971), involves a pun: "night spawn," "night's pawn," and "knight's pawn," heralding the ludic nature of the whole book. Nightspawn plays with literary conventions in order to show their exhaustive nature. It is an inside-out novel, one of the very few metanovels to have come out of Ireland. Ben White tells of a coup d'etat in Greece and his embroilment therein. White is a writer and he succeeds in working his account into a gripping thriller. But Nightspawn is anything but a straitlaced thriller; it is a parody of the narrative genre. Most scenes end in farce. Behind all the parodying, the playful turning upside-down of conventions and self-reflexive commenting, there lies a most serious intention: the age-old desire of the artist to express the things in their essence, to transfix beauty and truth. Like Beckett's narrators, White permanently urges himself on 'to express it all.' But he fails, is bound to fail, because every artist must necessarily fail in this respect, beauty and truth defying efforts.

A similar predicament underlies Birchwood (1973). The novel treats of the fall of the big house Birchwood and its inhabitants, the Godkins. Gabriel Godkin, the sole survivor of the family, searches among the madeleines of his memories for the sense of his life. He himself speaks of madeleines, thus slyly referring to Marcel Proust's masterwork A la recherche du temps perdu. Like Marcel in Proust's novel, Gabriel strives to come to terms with his life by writing it down in the form of a sustained narrative. Since Birchwood was a big house, what would be better than to employ the conventions of the big house novel? In his hands, though, these take a parodic turn, thus making it plain that they are ill equipped for getting at the truth. Banville exploits other genres (e.g. the Gothic, the picaresque), building up an intricate clockwork structure. But in the end, he feels constrained to acknowledge his failure. The "rosy grail," the symbol of beauty and truth, has eluded him. He has been only a wizard with words, a magician who has conjured up a world in which chaos, coincidences, slight-of-hand, and dark laughter hold sway. Gabriel accepts this Wittgensteinian despair, knowing that whereof he cannot speak thereof he must be silent.

Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), The Newton Letter (1982) and Mefisto (1986) make up Banville's "scientific" tetralogy. The first two novels chart the lives of the two famous astronomers, adhering faithfully to the historical facts. But Copernicus and Kepler are no historical novels in the strict sense; the historical reconstruction is just a means to a different end. Here, as in The Newton Letter and Mefisto, the main concern is with communicating a particular idea. Kepler and Copernicus are representatives of what The Newtow Letter terms "those high cold heroes who renounced the world and human happiness to pursue the big game of the intellect." They sough to explain the world by means of unifying systems, gearing their whole lives toward that one goal.

The historian in The Newton Letter has rented the lodge of a big house in the south of Ireland to put the finishing touches to his biography of Newton. He comes into contact with the people who live on the estate and dreams up horrid dramas around them that have no basis in fact, thus failing to see the tragedy that is playing itself out in real life.

Gabriel Swan's Faustian efforts in Mefisto aim at accounting for the world in terms of numbers. But the chaos of life through which he is led by the Mephistophelian Felix defies him, and he decides to leave everything to chance. Yet, Gabriel is a cunning old fox. Like his namesake in Birchwood, he tells his own story and tells it in such a way that everywhere mirror-symmetries and parallelisms result. Thus, the novel's two parts correspond as far as characters and events are concerned; the opening is mirrored by the ending. The world of Mefisto is indebted to recent ideas in computer mathematics and chaos theory. In addition, this world is Mephistophelian, imbued by Nietzsche's dictum that God is dead.

The tetralogy investigates the scientific imagination and finds its closely related to the creative, artistic imagination. The Book of Evidence (1989) and Ghosts (1993) deal with how the imagination of the artist operates upon reality. Freddie Montgomery, in The Book of Evidence, murders a young woman who comes upon him while he is stealing a painting, a portrait of a Dutch woman, with which he is hopelessly infatuated. He is now in prison awaiting his trial; and, knowing that he will not be given a proper chance to explain his heinous deed, he writes his 'book of evidence.' Essentially, through, this book represents an attempt to bring the young woman, whom he says he could kill because he did not imagine her vividly enough, back to life. The manner in which Freddie goes about his task is highly significant. While in prison, he has developed into an expert on seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and to a large extent he views the world with the eye of a painter. Moreover, he transfixes his own life and that of his victim by caging them in art, literature, and films, with a large number of intertextual echoes.

If The Book of Evidence is, to a large extent, about the world as perceived by the artistic imagination, then Ghosts is about the world as 'created' by the artistic imagination. After his release from prison, Freddie Montgomery has come to a penitential island. He is seeking atonement for his callous crime; he feels compelled to bring the woman he killed back to life, and he attempts to do so by weaving a narrative around a group of shipwrecked pleasure trippers who spend a couple of hours on the island. A little world is gradually coming into being, one characterized by absences and a state of suspension, like ghosts who belong to neither the world of the living nor the world of the dead. It is the world of art and a world grounded in art: the commedia dell'arte and the fetes galantes paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau, who figures as the artist Vaublin - in short, the world of romance and pastel.

Among the awards Banville's book have won are The Allied Irish Banks Fiction Prize, the American-Irish Foundation Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Guardian Fiction Prize. In 1989, The Book of evidence was short-listed for the Booker Prize and was awarded the first Guinness Peat Aviation Award. Ghosts was short-listed for the Whitbread Fiction Prize in 1993.

By Rudiger Imhof (from the Dictionary of Irish Literature edited by Robert Hogan)