John Banville

Described by the Washington Post as ‘one of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today’, John Banville is probably Ireland’s most garlanded and celebrated writer. He has won numerous international awards, including the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2005 for The Sea, and the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize. His most recent novel Mrs Osmond (2017) is a masterly ‘sequel’ to the canonical Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, in which Banville muses, in the style of the great American master, on the future of the free-spirited Isabel Archer. This will be his second appearance in Kells as that most eminent writer of literary fiction, John Banville. He has also appeared at our festival in his alternative guise, that of prolific crime novelist Benjamin Black. He talks to Myles Dungan.