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AUTHOR JOHN BANVILLE is to be presented with a lifetime achievement award at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards later this month.
The Booker Prize winner will join the ranks of Maeve Binchy, John McGahern, Edna O’Brien and Seamus Heaney who have all previously been presented with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award.
The 67-year-old writer has had a book published almost every three years since his first collection of short stories was published when he was 25. Most recently he has published five books under the pen name Benjamin Black. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2005 for The Sea, sixteen years after he was first nominated for the prestigious prize.
“Ireland’s international reputation in contemporary literary fiction owes perhaps more to John Banville than to any other writer and we are indebted to him for it,” said Bert Wright, the administrator of the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards.
He praised the mixture of “high seriousness” and “wry Irish playfulness” in Banville’s works, noting that he is “constantly trying to write a perfect sentence”.
“His insatiable curiosity and wonderment at the human condition animates his work at all times, boh in the Banville novels and in the more recent Benjamin Black genre novels,” said Wright. “What’s more, and particularly enduring to booksellers, his books sell”.
The awards celebrate the best Irish books published in the last year. The public can vast their vote on the shortlists on the awards website until 21 November 2013.
Winners at last year’s awards included Edna O’Brien, Mary O’Rourke, Maeve Binchy, Donal Ryan, Eoin Colfer, John Banville and Tana French.
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People are causing dangerous conditions, not ice. Conditions are conditions.
Don’t make unnecessary journeys. Please take care on treacherous roads.
No. Icy conditions ‘slow things down’. Things like not indicating properly or not watching your mirrors, or unrestrained children, or worn tyres, now that’s what creates dangerous driving conditions.
Dublin City roads icy?
Main roads seem to be ok but there is some ice on smaller roads and in estates.
So much for commuting to Dublin for all the jobs that have created in Dublin in recession years ” gatzos vans , ice,snow, floods, tailbacks, parking, clamping,blood pressure,stress,long days ,poor quality of family live,tiredness, etc,
It would do you well to spend some time living outside Dublin and then you’d realise how easy you really have it. There were no buses running from my hometown in Cork this morning…think of all the people who rely purely on that bus (because we they don’t have the transport options you have) to get to work. And that happened every icy day in the past few years when I was living there.
We’re not all commuters. People drive in the morning for all sorts of reasons, not just to work.
Footpaths and roads (Cork) very bad walking the dog this morning, usual 25 minute route took us 40 minutes!
Thankfully I work from home on Fridays so that’s all I had to deal with.
Maryborough Woods is like an ice rink. Crash on Carr’s hill earlier due to ice. Traffic very slow on N28 from Douglas to Shanbally
Thanks, I’ll add that in to the liveblog now.
have your say