It would be unfair to label John Banville a "writer's writer," because it would suggest he is not a writer easily accessible to the majority of readers. Yet, there is no doubt that Banville's work has attracted much critical opinion emphasizing the...

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...

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize for fiction Wednesday, beating such celebrated nominees as Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan.The $120,000 prize is awarded every two years for a body of fiction.Achebe, 76, is best known for his first...

Irish writer Anne Enright won the Man Booker fiction prize Tuesday for "The Gathering," an uncompromising portrait of a troubled family.She is the second Irish writer to win the prize in the past three years, after John Banville's "The Sea" in 2005.Enright had been considered...

Commentary on the new Philip Roth novel (see page C18) has ranged from the ecstatic (in Newsweek, David Gates declared Exit Ghost “an ideal farewell” to Nathan Zuckerman—“at this point, Roth is everybody’s daddy”) to the lethal (Christopher Hitchens, in The Atlantic Monthly, airs the...

In the following essay, Jackson traces one of Banville's major themes: "the situation of living everyday life in the context of postmodern understandings of knowledge and truth."

In the following essay, McIlroy examines the connection between scientific and literary pursuits in Banville's The Newton Letter, and asserts that it "is an ingenious exploration of how conceptual frames, both artistic and scientific, are imagined and reimagined to produce new syntheses."

In the following essay, Deane, a well-known poet, discusses Banville's awareness that the world he creates in his books is fictive.