Iain Banks – Year of election 2009

Iain Banks’s first novel, The Wasp Factory, appeared in 1984, and was described as “a work of unparalleled depravity”. It was also an enormous success. Since then he has published more than 20 novels, of which 10 are science fiction written under the name Iain M. Banks. He had submitted The Wasp Factory over that name, but it is said that his editor forbade the middle initial in case he became confused with Rosie M. Banks – the fictional romantic novelist in P.G. Wodehouse’s books who wrote A Red, Red Summer Rose and ’Twas Once in May. Not quite the same thing. 

“I wanted to be a writer from the age of 11,” Iain Banks says. “I started trying to write novels when I was 14, worked jolly hard at it and – after a lot of achingly purple prose, helpful comments by patient friends and numerous rejection slips – became an overnight success 16 years later. I hope to continue writing a mixture of science fiction and relatively normal novels into my dotage, a stage of my life I trust I shall resist admitting has actually begun until I am entirely too gaga ever again to form a reliably settled opinion on anything. So far so good, then.”