The Sea

John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. He was born in Wexford, South-East Ireland, in 1945. He was educated to the secondary level but did not progress to university, despite his early hopes of pursuing a career as an artist or architect. Leaving education at 18, he worked as an airline clerk, taking advantage of discounted air travel to explore Greece and Italy. He subsequently moved to Dublin, working as a journalist and editor for The Irish Press and The Irish Times.

Banville’s first novel was published in 1971. He is the author of 21 novels, of which The Sea is the 14th. He is best known for his three trilogies of novels: the Revolutions Trilogy (1976-1982), which focuses on three great scientists, the Frames Trilogy (1989-1995), which anticipates The Sea in its focus on visual art and use of unreliable male first-person narrators (See: Literary Devices), and the Cleave Trilogy of mystery novels (2000-2012). Since 2006, Banville has published crime fiction under the pen name Benjamin Black.

In his highly lyrical prose style and his use of self-aware and self-absorbed unreliable first-person narrators, Banville has acknowledged an affinity for the authors Nabokov and Proust and the Irish authors Joyce and Beckett. He has also cited strong autobiographical influences, saying that The Sea was influenced by his childhood summers at Rosslare Strand and the feelings he had for girls of his own age when he was 10 or 11 years old (“Interview: John Banville Talks The Sea, Writing & BBC Series.” The Irish Post, 10 Aug. 2013). Resembling the aspirational young Max’s attitude toward his own birth family, Banville writes of his early life that he “forsook” the town of his birth, together with his parents, viewing his original home and family as “no more than a staging post on [his] way elsewhere” (Banville, John. “On the Undreamed Lives of My Parents.” Literary Hub, 27 Feb. 2018).

Banville has won many awards for his writing, including the James Tait Memorial Prize in 1976 and the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011. The Sea won the Booker Prize in 2005.