Born in 1940, Russell Banks was raised in the working class world depicted in much of his writing. A native of Newton, Massachusetts, Banks graduated from The University of North Carolina in 1967 and tried his hand at a variety of work before he began submitting short fiction and poetry to magazines and found himself able to survive as a writer.
His novels Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and Affliction was shorlisted for the PEN/Faulkner. He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, Ingram Merrill Award, The St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction, O. Henry and Best American Short Story Award, The John Dos Passos Award, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Two of his novels, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter were made into critcally acclaimed movies, and his most recent novel, The Darling, was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2004.
Nationality:
American
Recent Work:
The Darling (2004)
