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From The Times
January 5, 2008

Iain Banks

The 50 greatest postwar writers: 38

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“Repulsive”, “loathsome”, “the lurid literary equivalent of a video nasty”. Although reviewers of Iain Banks’s debut The Wasp Factory were not entirely convinced of its moral value, they couldn’t deny that it heralded the arrival of a brilliant new imagination. The blackly comic tale of a disturbed teenager’s invented myths and gruesome murders on a remote island became a cult classic, but Banks didn’t rest on his spiky laurels. In the subsequent 23 years he has produced 22 novels, encompassing eccentric family sagas — The Crow Road (dramatised by the BBC), and his latest, The Steep Approach to Garbadale — surreal thrillers such as The Bridge and Canal Dreams, and science-fiction “space operas” under the distinctly unsecretive pseudonym Iain M. Banks. An entertaining and outspoken writer, at 53 Banks still has something of the enfant terrible about him.

One to read: The Wasp Factory (1984)

More about Iain Banks

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