This month marks 10 years since the award-winning novelist Iain Banks died aged 59. The beloved Scottish writer, who wrote literary fiction as Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M Banks, began his writing career with the hit novel The Wasp Factory in 1984. He went on to write more than 30 books, including novels, short story collections and Raw Spirit, a travelogue of Scotland and its whisky distilleries. (In 2006 the author won Celebrity Mastermind, his specialist subject being malt whiskies.) In celebration of Banks’ rich and varied work, Steven Poole picks out some good ways in to his world. Photograph: Abacus The entry point Iain Banks’s debut novel, The Wasp Factory, granted him instant fame if not unanimous praise. The Evening Standard recoiled at “a repulsive piece of work”, while the Irish Times called it “a work of unparalleled depravity”, which no doubt made the Marquis de Sade feel unfairly forgotten. Repulsive and depraved it certainly is, of course, but it is also poetic and horribly funny: its narrator, 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, …

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