Russell Banks

RUSSELL BANKS is the internationally acclaimed author of twenty-one works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, The Book of Jamaica, Cloudsplitter, Lost Memory of Skin, and most recently, A Permanent Member of the Family, short stories, and Voyager: Travel Writings. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Two of his novels, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter were made into award-winning feature films. His essays and reviews have been published in major magazines, and he has written screenplays and poetry.

Banks has won numerous honors for his work, including Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships; O’Henry and Best American Short Story Awards; the John Dos Passos Award; the inaugural Thornton Wilder Prize, the American Book Award; the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Anisfield-Wolf Prize, and the 2011 Common Wealth Award for Literature. He has been a PEN/Faulkner Finalist (Affliction, Cloudsplitter, and Lost Memory of Skin), a Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction (Lost Memory of Skin), and twice a Pulitzer Prize Finalist (Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter). 

He has taught at many universities and is the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He was the New York State Author (2004-2008), President of the International Parliament of Writers, and the founding past-President of Cities of Refuge North America. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has received seven honorary degrees and in 2014 was named an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. Banks currently lives in upstate New York and Miami, Florida, with his wife, the poet Chase Twichell.