John Banville

Christine Falls (2006) set a hard-drinking Dublin pathologist named Quirke at the head of a crime series that John Banville published as Benjamin Black, keeping it apart from the work that had won him the Booker Prize a year earlier for The Sea. Born in Wexford on 8 December 1945, he did not go to university; he took a clerk's job at Aer Lingus for the cheap travel, subbed at the Irish Press, then joined the Irish Times, where he was literary editor from 1988 to 1999. The Black novels were written fast and plain, the Banville ones slowly and richly, from Doctor Copernicus through The Book of Evidence to The Infinities. He later dropped the split. Snow (2020), a case for Detective Inspector St John Strafford in a snowbound Wexford country house in 1957, carries his own name, as does The Singularities (2022), which gathers figures from across his earlier fiction, Freddie Montgomery among them, onto a single estate. He received the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011 and the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2014.