Irish · b. 1945
John Banville won the 2005 Booker Prize for "The Sea," a meditation on memory, loss, and art through a widower's return to a seaside town. The Irish author has been shortlisted for the Booker three times and writes prose of such density and beauty that critics compare him to Nabokov. Banville also writes crime fiction under the name Benjamin Black. His sentences demand slow reading and reward it with pleasures rare in contemporary fiction.