"I am guilty of everything I am accused of, but being innocent would be worse"
John Banville presents 'The Drowned' at BCNegra, the latest novel he has written under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black
![John Banville (aka Benjamin Black) at BCNegra 2025.](https://static1.ara.cat/clip/567f4230-2c17-447f-8fcc-52d93bfea964_16-9-aspect-ratio_default_0_x1064y0.jpg)
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BarcelonaAlthough I am about to turn 80, John Banville He has no intention of slowing down his creative pace. He continues to publish a novel a year and has a busy schedule of presentations around the world. Ironic, talkative and always ready to humiliate himself –"Do you really understand me? Sometimes I think I'm just talking nonsense," he said on Friday afternoon–, the Irish writer has been one of the highlights of the BCNegra 2025 thanks to the presentation ofThe drowned (Bromera/Alfaguara), the latest novel from his most famous pseudonym, Benjamin Black, with which he has signed a dozen titles.
"I invented Black twenty years ago because for the first time I had written a novel where there was a crime, inspired in part by reading the novels of Georges Simenon, one of the great authors of the 20th century," he recalled at the Bosque cinema together with the journalist Xavi Ayén, head of Culture at The Vanguard, who has tried, without success, to analyse the particularities of his production as Black, but also that of Banville, whose work he has recommended reading The singularities. "I don't like the idea of an author writing crime novel –Banville said–. Novels are either good or bad. That's it."
Banville grew up in Wexford, a small town about a hundred kilometres from Dublin. "Years ago, my parents would give me train tickets to go to Dublin. I thought it was a wonderful place. Even though I've lived there for years, I've always felt like one." outsider. It's a good feeling for a writer," he said. The young Banville dreamed of writing while playing with toy guns. Perhaps this detail prompted him, many years later, to invent Inspector Strafford and the forensic pathologist Quirke, the duo that has already starred in a dozen novels and one. In his novels he was not interested in finding out who killed whom, but in studying the characters and their reactions: I try to do the same - he admitted - You can write a crime novel without anyone dying. I have done it. And you can write others like that. normal full of crimes, because life itself is a crime." Banville has further elaborated on this statement later: "Since I was a child I have betrayed my parents and my brothers, and now as an adult I have done the same with my children. I would exchange a child for a good paragraph in the next novel."
Banville is currently working on two books: the novel The last man and an autobiography. "I'm just going to tell lies," he said. "I'm putting in a lot of details that embarrass me. I think artists are the luckiest people on Earth, because even the most terrible things end up feeding our works." For the Irish author, writing a good sentence is "like touching a spider's web and making it vibrate," and age has not stopped him from "being surprised by how dazzling the world is." However, from time to time, the novelist also experiences some difficult moments. "One of the times I was most scared was in front of The Grandmothers "Velázquez," he explained. It was a few years ago, when he was able to enter the museum outside of visiting hours and was left alone in front of the painting by one of his favourite painters. "When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back at you, and the same thing happens with a work of art of this category," he added. "I am guilty of everything I am accused of, but being innocent would be worse: I would like to say that I have lived a boring life."