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Vol. 5, No. 1 - October 7, 2005
| Irish novelist John Banville to Deliver Steloff Lecture
Titled "Fiction and the Dream," the event is free and open to the public. Banville will receive an honorary doctorate from the College prior to the lecture. Regarded as the most stylistically inventive and daring of contemporary Irish writers, Banville is a philosophical novelist concerned with the nature of perception, the conflict between imagination and reality, and the unstable nature of identity. Born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945, Banville was literary editor of the Irish Times between 1988 and 1999. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and has written more than a dozen books of fiction, the first of which was Long Lankin, a collection of short stories published in 1970, followed by Nightspawn (1971) and Birchwood (1973), both novels. Banville's fictional portrait of the 15th-century Polish astronomer Dr. Copernicus (1976) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and was the first in a series of books exploring the lives of eminent scientists and scientific ideas. The second novel in the series, Kepler (1981), was about the 16th-century German astronomer and won the Guardian Fiction Prize. The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982) is the story of an academic who is writing a book about the mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. Mefisto (1986) explores the world of numbers in a reworking of Dr. Faustus. The Book of Evidence (1989), which won the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award and was short listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction, Ghosts (1993), and Athena (1995) form a loose trilogy of novels narrated by Freddie Montgomery, a convicted murderer. The central character of Banville's 1997 novel, The Untouchable, Victor Maskell, is based on the art historian and spy Anthony Blunt. Banville's most recent books are the novels Eclipse (2000) and Shroud (2002), as well as a non-fiction work entitled Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City (2003), which is a personal evocation of the magical European city. His latest book is The Sea (2005), which is described by Adam Phillips in an August 2005 issue of The London Review of Books as "masterful" and "a characteristically dazzling and brilliant novel by the one writer who is capable of producing such a work." The Sea has been nominated for a 2005 Booker Prize, which The New York Times has called "perhaps the most distinguished prize for literary fiction in the English-speaking world." This year's prizewinner will be named Monday, Oct. 10. Skidmore's annual Steloff Lecture was established in 1967 by Frances Steloff, a native of Saratoga Springs who became a well-known patron of writers and founded the Gotham Book Mart in New York City. She endowed the lecture series as a way to bring outstanding literary and artistic talent to the College.
Skidmore
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The great Irish novelist and man of letters John Banville will deliver the annual Frances Steloff Lecture at Skidmore College at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 11, in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.