John Banville

Banville never attended university, working instead as a copy editor and later literary editor at Irish newspapers for decades while writing dense, stylistically ambitious fiction on the side, largely uninterested in conventional plot and openly influenced by Nabokov and Beckett. His early 'science tetralogy,' including Kepler and Doctor Copernicus, paired historical scientific figures with his signature ornate prose.

The Sea, a widower's return to a seaside town shadowed by childhood tragedy, won the Booker Prize, a surprise upset over more heavily favored novels that year. Restless with his own reputation for difficulty, he began writing crime fiction under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, producing a long series of Quirke novels set in 1950s Dublin, before eventually merging the two identities and publishing crime fiction under his own name as well.