Russell Banks was raised in New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts. The
eldest of four children, he grew up in a working-class environment, which has
played a major role in his writing.
Mr. Banks (who was the first in his family to go to college) attended Colgate
University for less than a semester, and later graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before he could support himself as
a writer, he tried his hand at plumbing, and as a shoe salesman and window
trimmer. More recently, he has taught at a number of colleges and universities,
including Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, University of New Hampshire, New
England College, New York University and Princeton University.
A prolific writer of fiction, his titles include Searching for Survivors,
Family Life, Hamilton Stark, The New World, The Book of Jamaica, Trailerpark,
The Relation of My Imprisonment, Continental Drift, Success Stories, Affliction,
The Sweet Hereafter, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, and The Angel On
The Roof, a collection of short stories. He has also contributed poems,
stories and essays to The Boston Globe Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New York
Times Book Review, Esquire, Harper’s, and many other publications.
His works have been widely translated and published in Europe and Asia. Two
of his novels have been adapted for feature-length films, The Sweet Hereafter
(directed by Atom Egoyan, winner of the Grand Prix and International Critics
Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival) and Affliction (directed by Paul
Schrader, starring Nick Nolte, Willem Dafoe, Sissy Spacek, and James Coburn). He
is the screenwriter of a film adaptation of Continental Drift.
Mr. Banks has won numerous awards and prizes for his work, among them 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. He is a Fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter
were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and 1998 respectively. Affliction
was short listed for both the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize and the Irish
International Prize.
He has lived in a variety of places, from New England to Jamaica, which have
contributed to the richness of his writing. He is currently living in upstate
New York.
He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, and is the father of
four grown daughters.
Photo by Robert Sargent Fay
This biography was last updated on 10/27/2004.
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