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Vol. 5, No. 4 - March 8, 2006
| Banville to Deliver Steloff Lecture John Banville, winner of the 2005 Booker Prize for The Sea as best English novel of the year, will deliver the Frances Steloff Lecture at 7 p.m. Friday March 31, at Skidmore College. Titled "Fiction and the Dream," the lecture will take place in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Admission is free and open to the public. Banville had been scheduled to appear at Skidmore last October, one day after the Booker Prize ceremonies in London, where the best book of the year is announced. As a finalist, he planned to attend the ceremonies, and then to fly to the United States early the following day. An earlier Banville novel, The Book of Evidence, had been a previous Booker Prize finalist, and others of his books had also been nominated for the Booker. The New York Times has called the Booker Prize "perhaps the most distinguished prize for literary fiction in the English-speaking world." According to Robert Boyers, Tisch Professor of Arts and Letters and professor of English, "The great Irish author's assumption was that 'of course' his new book would, in the end, fail to receive the prize. When The Sea was announced as the winning entry on that October evening, it became clear at once that the ensuing chaos of interviews and appearances would not allow Banville to make his date at Skidmore. "Apologetic, he vowed at once to 'make it up' to his audience here, and within a week he had made another date to come to Skidmore for an occasion in which he will lecture and also receive an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the College." 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. The Sea (2005) was 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." 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.
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