William John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter. Though he has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov", Banville himself maintains that W.B. Yeats and Henry James are the two real influences on his work.

Banville has won numerous awards such as the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2003 International Nonino Prize, the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007 and was made a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia in 2017 by Italy.

He was born and grew up in Wexford town in south-east Ireland. Banville published his first novel, Nightspawn, in 1971. A second, Birchwood, followed two years later. "The Revolutions Trilogy", published between 1976 and 1982, includes Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, and The Newton Letter. These works explore scientific themes, as does his novel Mefisto, part of the "Scientific Tetralogy." His 1989 novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won that year’s Guinness Peat Aviation award.

Banville also writes crime novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, featuring the character of Quirke, an Irish pathologist based in 1950s Dublin. His alternative history novel The Secret Guests (2020) was published under the name B. W. Black. He currently resides in Dublin.