For the second lecture as part of our Banville at 80 series of events in appreciation of his literary work to date, we invite you to join Professor Christopher Morash to explore the literary archive of Wexford born author John Banville. 
For more than sixty years, John Banville has written almost every day, day in, day out.  The results have been remarkable; more than thirty novels, among them some of the greatest Irish novels of recent years; but also plays, screenplays, and innumerable reviews.  The Library of Trinity College Dublin holds Banville’s complete literary archive, and working through the manuscripts offers a rare insight into how this most dedicated of Irish writers pursues his art.

Professor Chris Morash FTCD, MRIA, is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing in Trinity College Dublin, and the author a numerous essays and books on a range of aspects of Irish literature and culture. Dublin: A Writer’s City was published in 2023, and Yeats on Theatre appeared in 2021, both for Cambridge University Press. Earlier books include Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford, 1995), A History of Irish Theatre, 1601-2000 (Cambridge, 2001), A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge, 2009) and Mapping Irish Theatre [with Shaun Richards] (Cambridge, 2013). He has been a MacGeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and was invited to curate a series of plays, entitled Unseen Plays, for the Abbey Theatre (also 2021). He chairs the judging panel for the International Dublin Literary Award. His current projects include editing The Cambridge History of the Irish Novel, due to be published in late 2025, and he is writing a book on Irish literary salons. He was previously Professor of English in Maynooth University and served as Vice-Provost of TCD (2016-2019).