John Banville was born and raised in Wexford, Ireland, the youngest of three children. By Banville’s account, the household was not a literary one, but both his brother Vincent and his sister Vonnie also became writers.  As a boy, he enjoyed adventure stories, but when he was 13, his sister gave him a copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners.  Joyce’s gemlike tales of his native city gave the young John Banville his first intimation that compelling fiction could be drawn from the materials of everyday life.  Inspired by Joyce’s example, Banville wrote stories throughout his teens, as he progressed from a Christian Brothers primary school to St. Peter’s College secondary school in Wexford. The young Banville considered becoming a painter or an architect, but after a false start studying architecture, he decided to forgo further formal education and took a job as a clerk with Ireland’s national airline, Aer Lingus. The work held little interest for him, but he was eager to leave home and see the world, and the airline offered its employees a generous discount for air travel.  Banville took advantage of the opportunity to travel to Paris, Rome, and Athens, collecting impressions and experiences he would later use in his fiction. Traveling in the United States in the late 1960s, he was drawn to the cultural ferment of San Francisco and Berkeley, where he met Janet Dunham, a young artist studying at the University of California. Banville stayed in the San Francisco Bay area for two years. He and Dunham were married, and she returned to Ireland with him in 1969.

Settling in Dublin, Banville found work as a sub-editor — or copy editor, as the position is known in the United States — at The Irish Press, a daily newspaper. He continued to write all the while, and in 1970 his first book of stories, Long Lankin, was published. His first novel, Nightspawn, appeared in 1971, followed by a second novel, Birchwood, two years later. Many years would pass before Banville could depend on his writing for his livelihood, and he continued to work at The Irish Press while he and Janet raised their two sons.

As Banville acquired mastery of his form, he undertook more and more ambitious projects. In a trilogy of novels — Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981) and The Newton Letter (1982) — he explored the lives of pioneering scientists. The first of these brought Banville one of his first major literary awards, the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. The Newton Letter was the first of Banville’s works to be adapted for film or television. Banville’s television adaptation, Reflections, was broadcast by the BBC in 1984. A standalone novel, Mefisto (1986), was followed by another trilogy. The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995) feature an interlocking cast of characters and deal with questions of art, mythology, murder, and a disturbingly unreliable narrator.

The Book of Evidence drew its inspiration from an actual murder committed in Dublin some years previously and was shortlisted for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize.  Banville’s novels were attracting increasing attention from the literary press. The Irish Press, financially troubled for years, finally ceased publication in 1995, and Banville moved to The Irish Times, where he was appointed literary editor in 1998. He remained at the Times for many years and has continued to contribute reviews to the paper long after he ceased to depend on it for his income. His work was being read well outside of Ireland, and he began writing essays and criticism for international publications, including The New York Review of Books.

Banville continued to branch out in his writing, with another film for television and the first of a series of adaptations of plays by the 19th-century German author Heinrich von Kleist. He drew more praise for his 1997 novel, The Untouchable, which dealt with a fictional traitor, modeled in part on Sir Anthony Blunt, the British art historian and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, who was exposed publicly as a Soviet spy many years after his confession to the authorities.

A third trilogy, also featuring a recurring set of characters, began to appear in 2000, with Eclipse, followed by Shroud (2002). The following years, Banville published a work of nonfiction, Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City. Banville continued his interest in the work of Heinrich von Kleist with God’s Gift (2000) and Love in the Wars (2005), theatrical adaptations of Kleist’s Amphitryon and Penthesilea, respectively.  Banville’s novel The Sea (2005) is set, in part, in an Irish seaside village like one the author knew as a child. The Sea was acclaimed as Banville’s masterwork and at last brought him the Booker Prize, the most coveted award in English letters.

On the side, Banville concocted an alter ego, “Benjamin Black,” to write genre mystery novels as a vacation from his serious literary work.  He writes his Benjamin Black stories more quickly than his other novels, usually over the summer, returning to his literary labors in the autumn. Half a dozen of the Black novels, beginning with Christine Falls in 2006, featured as their protagonist a Dublin pathologist called Dr. Quirke, but more recently, “Benjamin Black” has taken on historical subjects as well.  In The Black-Eyed Blonde, Black continued the adventures of Philp Marlowe, the hard-boiled sleuth created by American crime writer Raymond Chandler in the 1930s.

Under his own name, John Banville continued a variety of literary activities, writing screenplays for films, including Albert Nobbs, from a story by the Irish writer George Moore; The End of the Affair, based on the novel by Graham Greene; and the film adaptation of his own novel The Sea. His subsequent novels have included The Infinities (2009), which revisited the myth of Amphitryon he had explored in God’s Gift; Ancient Light (2012), which concluded the trilogy begun with Eclipse and Shroud; and the 2015 novel The Blue Guitar. In 2016, Banville published a nonfiction travelogue and love letter to the city he has long called home, Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir.

Banville’s work has enjoyed great success not only in the English-speaking world but in translation.  He has received three major literary prizes — including a knighthood — in Italy alone, as well as honors in Austria, the Czech Republic (the Franz Kafka Prize) and Spain (the Prince of Asturias Award).  He has been proposed repeatedly as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

As a young writer, Banville had struggled to escape the overpowering influence of his compatriot James Joyce and found an alternative model in the work of another Irish author, Samuel Beckett, whose novels and plays often featured eccentric, obsessive narrators like those found in some of Banville’s works. Critics have compared Banville’s rapturous attention to the details of everyday life to the work of the French novelist Marcel Proust and the great Russian-American stylist Vladimir Nabokov.  Although Banville has acknowledged his admiration for Nabokov as well as Franz Kafka, he has long claimed the American author Henry James as his most important influence. Banville repaid his debt to James with a tribute in the form of a novel, Mrs. Osmond (2017), continuing the story of Isabel Archer, the heroine of James’s Portrait of a Lady.

In 2020, Banville announced that he was abandoning his Benjamin Black pseudonym and merged his two authorial personae in Snow, a novel, set in Ireland in the 1950s, which fuses the conventions of the traditional “country house” mystery with the sophistication of Banville’s literary fiction.

Having already published more than 30 books, John Banville continues to write every day, keeping regular hours in an office he maintains near his home in Dublin. His marriage to Janet Dunham ended many years ago and their sons are grown. Since then, he has lived in Dublin with his partner, Patricia Quinn. They have two daughters.