Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland. His father worked in a garage and died when Banville was in his early thirties; his mother was a housewife. He is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is also a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own. His sister Vonnie Banville-Evans has written both a children's novel and a reminiscence of growing up in Wexford.

Banville was educated at a Christian Brothers school and at St Peter's College, Wexford. Despite having intended to be a painter and an architect he did not attend university. Banville has described this as "A great mistake. I should have gone. I regret not taking that four years of getting drunk and falling in love. But I wanted to get away from my family. I wanted to be free.". After school he worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus which allowed him to travel at deeply-discounted rates. He took advantage of this to travel in Greece and Italy. He lived in the United States during 1968 and 1969. On his return to Ireland he became a sub-editor at the Irish Press, rising eventually to the position of chief sub-editor. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970.

After the Irish Press collapsed in 1995, he became a sub-editor at the Irish Times. He was appointed literary editor in 1998. The Irish Times, too, suffered severe financial problems, and Banville was offered the choice of taking a redundancy package or working as a features department sub-editor. He left. Banville has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1990. In 1984, he was elected to the Irish arts association Aosdána, but resigned in 2001, so that some other artist might be allowed to receive the cnuas [annuity]. He described himself in an interview with Argentine paper La Nacíon, as a West Brit. [1] Banville also writes crime fiction under the pen name Benjamin Black, beginning with Christine Falls (2006).

Banville has two adult sons with his wife, the American textile artist Janet Dunham. They met during his visit to San Francisco in 1968 where she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. Dunham described him during the writing process as being like "a murderer who's just come back from a particularly bloody killing". Banville has two daughters from his relationship with Patricia Quinn, former head of the Arts Council of Ireland.

Banville has a strong interest in animal rights, and is often featured in Irish media speaking out against vivisection in Irish university research.

Banville is considered by critics as a master stylist of the English language, and his writing has been described as perfectly crafted, beautiful, dazzling. David Mehegan of the Boston Globe calls Banville "one of the great stylists writing in English today"; Don DeLillo described his work "dangerous and clear-running prose;" Val Nolan in The Sunday Business Post calls his style "lyrical, fastidious, and occasionally hilarious"; The Observer described his 1989 work, The Book of Evidence, as "flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita." Banville himself has admitted that he is "trying to blend poetry and fiction into some new form" Banville is known for his dark humour, and sharp, wintery wit.

Banville has written two trilogies; The Revolutions Trilogy, consisting of Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter and a second unnamed trilogy consisting of The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, Athena.

Banville is highly scathing of all of his work, stating of his books "I hate them all ... I loathe them. They're all a standing embarrassment." Instead of dwelling on the past Banville is continually looking forward; "You have to crank yourself up every morning and think about all the awful stuff you did yesterday, and how how you can compensate for that by doing better today". He writes only about a hundred words a day for his literary novels, versus several thousand words a day for his Benjamin Black crime fiction. He appreciates his work as Black as a craft while as Banville he is an artist, though he does consider crime-writing, in his own words, as being "cheap fiction".

Banville is highly influenced by Heinrich von Kleist, having written adaptations of three of his plays (including Amphitrion) and having again used Amphitrion as a basis for his novel The Infinities. One of Banvilles earlier influences was James Joyce — "After I'd read the Dubliners, and was struck at the way Joyce wrote about real life, I immediately started writing bad imitations of the Dubliners"

Short story collection

• Long Lankin (1970; revised ed.1984)

Novels

• Nightspawn (1971)
• Birchwood (1973)
• The Revolutions Trilogy :
• Doctor Copernicus: A Novel (1976)
• Kepler, a Novel (1981)
• The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982)
• Mefisto (1986)
• The Book of Evidence (1989)
• Ghosts (1993)
• Athena: A Novel (1995)
• The Ark (1996) (only 260 copies published)
• The Untouchable (1997)
• Eclipse (2000)
• Shroud (2002)
• Prague Pictures: Portrait Of A City (2003)
• The Sea (2005)
• The Infinities (2009)

Plays

• The Broken Jug: After Heinrich von Kleist (1994)
• Seachange (performed 1994 in the Focus Theatre, Dublin; unpublished)
• Dublin 1742 (performed 2002 in The Ark, Dublin; a play for 9—14 year olds; unpublished)
• God's Gift: A Version of Amphitryon by Heinrich von Kleist (2000)
• Love In The Wars (adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea, 2005)
• Conversation In The Mountains (radio play, forthcoming 2008)

As "Benjamin Black"

• Christine Falls (2006)
• The Silver Swan (2007)
• The Lemur (2008, previously serialised in The New York Times)
• Elegy for April (2010)

Book Reviews

• "The Family Pinfold" The New York Review of Books 54/11 (28 June 2007) : 20—21 [reviews Alexander Waugh, Fathers and Sons : the Autobiography of a Family]
• "Trump Cards" Bookforum (Dec/Jan 2010) : John Banville on The Original of Laura, Nabokov's final, unfinished novel.