John Banville is the most interesting and resourceful Irish novelist of his generation. A writer who has let his published work do most of his talking for him, he has done more than most of his contemporaries to challenge accepted ideas of what might constitute a tradition of Irish fiction, and has by his example moved aesthetic concerns much closer to the preeminence usually given to history and social preoccupations in Irish fiction.

Banville was born in Wexford, the county seat of Ireland's most southeasterly county. He was educated locally at the Christian Brothers primary school and St. Peter's College, the main diocesan secondary school. He did not attend university. He presently lives with his wife in the Dublin suburb of Howth and works as a copy editor for the Irish Press, a national daily. His artistic output has been confined almost exclusively to the novel, of which...