Iain Banks was a Scottish novelist, famous for his works "The Wasp Factory" and "The Crow Road". He is also known for communicating with his readers via the Internet.
Background
Iain Banks was born on February 16, 1954 at Dunfermline in Fife and spent his early years in North Queensferry. His father Tom worked for the Admiralty “getting crashed jets out the water”, and his mother Effie, who had been a professional ice skater in a touring review, met her husband while teaching skating at Dunfermline’s ice rink. Though an only child, Iain had a close-knit and large extended family; their name had originally been Banks Menzies, but Iain’s paternal grandfather, a miner and trade union activist, had reversed the surnames after drawing the attention of the police during the General Strike of 1926.
When Iain was nine, his father was posted to the west coast of Scotland, and the family moved from their home near the Forth Bridge. The boy’s principal childhood interests were television, reading science fiction, and producing homemade explosives from sugar and weedkiller.
Education
Iain Baks attended Gourock and Greenock High Schools.
In 1954 Iain was educated at Stirling University where he took courses in English, Psychology and Philosophy.
Career
After taking various jobs – from technician at the Nigg Bay oil platform construction site, and in the IBM computer plant at Greenock, to clerk in a law firm in London - he returned to Scotland in 1988.
Banks decided to become a writer at the age of 11 and completed his first novel "The Hungarian Lift-Jet at 16".
His first published novel, "The Wasp Factory", appeared in 1984, when he was 30 years old, though it had been rejected by six publishers before being accepted by Macmillan. The narrator is the 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, who lives with his taciturn father in an isolated house on the north-east coast of Scotland.The explanation of his isolation and his obsessiveness is shockingly revealed in one of the culminating plot twists for which Banks was to become renowned.
It was followed by "Walking on Glass "(1985), composed of three separate narratives whose connections are deliberately made obscure until near the end of the novel.
The next year's novel, "The Bridge", featured three separate stories told in different styles: one a realist narrative about Alex, a manager in an engineering company, who crashes his car on the Forth road bridge; another the story of John Orr, an amnesiac living on a city-sized version of the bridge; and a third, the first-person narrative of the Barbarian, retelling myths and legends in colloquial Scots.
His first science fiction novel, "Consider Phlebas", was published in 1987, though he had drafted it soon after completing The Wasp Factory. Banks cited Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison and Dan Simmons as literary influences.
"The Crow Road", published in 1992, was adapted as a BBC television series. Banks continued to write both science fiction and mainstream novels, with his final novel "The Quarry" published in June 2013, the month of his death.
Politics
Banks' political position has been described as "left of centre" and he was an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Distinguished Supporter of the Humanist Society of Scotland. As a signatory to the Declaration of Calton Hill,he was an open supporter of Scottish independence.