John Banville and Paul Joyce

John Banville is a Man Booker Prize-winning Irish novelist, an adapter of dramas, and a screenwriter, considered to be ‘one of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today’ (Washington Post).

Banville has received numerous awards in his career. His novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award in 1989. His fourteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. In 2011, Banville was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, while 2013 brought both the Irish PEN Award and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. In 2014 he won the Prince of Asturias Award in Letters.

He has published a number of crime novels as Benjamin Black, most featuring Quirke, an Irish pathologist based in Dublin.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.

Paul Joyce’s debut film, a unique co-operation with the playwright Samuel Beckett, and exhibitions which followed, established him internationally as a film-maker and photographer.