John Banville wins Lannan Literary Award worth $75,000

The novelist John Banville is among the six recipients of this year's Lannan Literary Awards. Details of the awards, which include Mr Banville's $75,000 prize and a $100,000 Lifetime Achievement Award for the American writer William Gass, were announced in Los Angeles yesterday.

Author of Dr Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), Mefisto (1986), The Book of Evidence which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize and The Untouchable, published earlier this year, John Banville (51) has long been admired by US critics. His new novel received excellent reviews in the US, unlike Britain where several of the reviewers became distracted by its historical context.

Loosely based on the Cambridge spy ring of the 1930s, The Untouchable is the story of Victor Maskell, an art historian and intellectual whose life is dominated by an unrequited love obsession. Most importantly, he is also an Irishman who has become as English as the English themselves.

Exposed as a spy, he decides to supply his version of his life and times. Although an obvious Booker contender, The Untouchable failed to make this year's shortlist, an omission which could be explained, it has been suggested, by the novel being too close to British establishment sensibilities for comfort.

Speaking yesterday about the prize and its citation which acknowledges his "evocative prose, experimental style and complex literary allusions" Mr Banville, who is also Literary Editor of The Irish Times, said: "I am honoured to find myself on an awards list which includes such fine writers, in particular William Gass, whose work . . . I have long admired."

Now in their ninth year, the awards were devised to "recognise exceptional writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry". Since 1989 the Lannan Foundation, founded by the late entrepreneur Patrick Lannan, has awarded more than $3.4 million to 75 emerging and established writers.

Also honoured this year are the New York fiction writer and poet Grace Paley; Canadian poet Anne Michaels, whose first novel Fugi- tive Pieces was published earlier this year; the English poet Ken Smith; and David Quammen who writes about the natural sciences. Previous Irish winners are the poets Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland, the writer William Trevor and the Irish Times journalist and writer Mary Morrissy.