Premio Vallombrosa - Gregor von Rezzori

John Banville

John Banville is an acclaimed Irish novelist and journalist. His novel, The Book of Evidence (1989), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. In between, he won several international prizes for fiction. Banville is known for his precise and cold prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators. His stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has."

Banville is considered by critics as a master stylist of the English language, and his writing has been described as perfectly-crafted, beautiful, and dazzling. David Mehegan of the Boston Globe calls Banville "one of the great stylists writing in English today;" Don DeLillo admired his "dangerous and clear-running prose;" and the Observer described his 1989 work, The Book of Evidence, as "flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita." He is also known for his mordant humour and sharp wit.

Banville also writes under the pen name Benjamin Black. His first novel under this pen-name was Christine Falls, which was followed by The Silver Swan in 2007.

Novels:

Long Lanking - Nightspawn - Birchwood - Doctor Copernicus: A Novel - Kepler, a Novel - The Newton Letter: An Interlude - Mefisto - The Book of Evidence - Ghosts - Athena: a Novel - The Ark - The Untouchable - God’s Gift - Eclipse - Shroud - The Sea - Love in The Wars.

Plays:

The Broken Jug: After Heinrich von Kleist (1994), Seachange (performed 1994 in the Focus Theatre, Dublin; unpublished), Dublin 1742 (performed 2002 in The Ark, Dublin; a play for 9-14 year olds; unpublished).

As Benjamin Black : Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007), The Lemur (2008, serialized in the New York Times)

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