MIT World Speakers

Russell Banks

Russell Banks was raised in a working-class environment, which has played a major role in his writing. Banks, who was the first in his family to go to college, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has tried his hand at plumbing, as a shoe salesman and window trimmer. His fiction titles include Searching for Survivors, The New World, The Book of Jamaica, The Relation of My Imprisonment, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter and Success Stories. His books Continental Drift, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter were made into movies. The Angel on the Roof is his first collection of short stories since the 1980’s. He has also contributed to The Boston Globe Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and Harper’s.

Mr. Banks has won numerous awards and prizes for his work, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship and the O. Henry and Best American Short Story Award. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His just-completed novel, The Darling, is due from HarperCollins in fall 2004.