a b "BBC News – Five Minutes With: Iain M Banks". Bbc.co.uk. 3 November 2012 . Retrieved 9 April 2013. Readers who know the Wasp Factory will remember its startling ending, where it is disclosed that Frank is not all he seems, and Iain reveals how this part of the story came to him.

Banks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. Iain Banks was educated at the University of Stirling where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. He moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh and then Fife. Kerridge, Jake (9 June 2013). "Iain Banks: an honest, funny and compassionate writer who beguiled 21st-century readers". The Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 12 January 2022 . Retrieved 18 June 2013. The Publisher Says: Frank--no ordinary sixteen-year-old--lives with his father outside a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least, unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; & his father measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank has turned to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations. In the bizarre daily rituals there is some solace. But when news comes of Eric's escape from the hospital Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's inevitable return--an event that explodes the mysteries of the past & changes Frank utterly.In 2010 he gave an interview to BBC Radio Scotland in which he spoke with painful frankness about the breakdown of his relationship with his first wife. But then the media interview seemed his natural forum: it is difficult to think of a more frequently interviewed British novelist.

Iain M. Banks – Award Bibliography". isfdb database. Al von Ruff. 1995–2011 . Retrieved 6 April 2013. The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks, has garnered many accolades since its initial release in 1984. The book has appeared on a number of greatest horror lists and in a poll was even named one of the top 100 novels of the century. To some, Banks is a visionary crafting a tale of the macabre. While others have viewed The Wasp Factory as little more than nonsensical garbage. The truth is probably somewhere in between. The Wasp Factory follows Frank Cauldhame, a teenager living with his father. Frank is not a normal child. By Frank’s own admission, he has killed three other children. Frank consoles himself that this was just a phase and has taken to divining the future with a contraption he has named “the wasp factory.” Frank also explores the possibility of telepathy utilizing the skull of a long deceased canine companion and warding off threats to his person utilizing “sacrifice poles.” So by 1980 I was getting fed up. Maybe I wasn't just an SF writer, after all. Maybe I should try writing an ordinary, boring, mainstream novel. Maybe it was even time to consider writing a second draft of one of these works of patent genius, rather than trusting that London publishers would have the wit to recognise an obvious rough diamond who, a trifling number of easily polished awkwardnesses having been dealt with, was surely about to make the ungrateful wretches millions . . .In 2010 Banks publicly joined the cultural boycott of Israel, refusing to allow his novels to be sold in the country. He was a frequent signatory of letters of protest to the Guardian and a name recruited to causes of which he approved, from secular humanism to the legalising of assisted suicide to the preservation of public libraries. Banks himself was a self-declared "evangelical atheist" and a man of decided political views, often expressed with humorous exasperation and sometimes requiring ripe language. He relished his public status as no-nonsense voice of a common-sense socialism that had an increasingly nationalistic tint. The Crow Road (1992). London: Scribners. ISBN 0-356-20652-1. Adapted for BBC TV in 1996 (directed by Gavin Millar). Banks met his wife Annie in London, before the release of his first book. They married in Hawaii in 1982. However, he announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. He lived most recently in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge. Stephen McGinty (8 April 2013). "Iain Banks marries in his favourite place". The Scotsman. Johnston Publishing Ltd . Retrieved 10 May 2013. The couple's wedding certificate shows that Banks, 59, of North Queensferry, married 42-year-old Miss Hartley at the five-star hotel [Inverlochy Castle Hotel, The Highlands], in a short humanist ceremony on Good Friday. Caroti, Simone (26 July 2018). The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction. McFarland. p.24. ISBN 978-1-4766-2040-4– via Google Books.

I am! Angry that I read this book! The vulgarity of the world makes me angry. We have abolished Ancient Roman gladiator games and Medieval public executions, only to find ourselves being completely absorbed by morbid stories, psychopaths and their victimization. I am angry! I've had enough!" Banks's next work of literary fiction was The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007), a return to the territory of The Crow Road. Banks's protagonist, Alban McGill, struggles to prevent his family's company from being taken over by a US giant, occasioning diatribes against American capitalism and American foreign policy that seem straightforwardly authorial. Empire Games, the seventh book in The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross published in 2017, is dedicated "For Iain M. Banks, who painted a picture of a better way." [65] It even opens, like The Bridge, with an evocation of the Forth road bridge, the building of which Banks had watched as a boy from his bedroom window – or at least in this case, of a fictional bridge resembling it. For all their formal inventiveness and play of ideas, his novels remain memorable for the sense they give of their author's personal memories and passions. Banks met his first wife Annie in London before the 1984 release of his first book. [31] They lived in Faversham in the south of England, then split up in 1988. Banks returned to Edinburgh and dated another woman for two years. Iain and Annie were reconciled a year later and they moved to Fife. [43] They were married in Hawaii in 1992, [31] but in 2007, after 15 years of marriage, they announced their separation. [44]Science Fiction: A lament – then Optimism and the Next Generation / First: Sad News". 10 June 2013.