NEW YORK, NY.- Kate Banks, who, despite personal tragedy and debilitating illness, became an award-winning author of children’s books and young-adult novels that captured the wonder of youth while also confronting fear and grief, died Feb. 24 in Basel, Switzerland. She was 64.
The cause was medically assisted death, following a Stage 4 neuroendocrine cancer diagnosis in 2022, her sister Amy Banks said.
Kate Banks had mast cell activation syndrome, a disorder of the immune system, and had been unable to undergo standard cancer treatments or take most medications, including those for pain.
Despite the ailment, which she had suffered for decades, and the lingering trauma from the murder of her father when she was in college, Banks was prolific, having published more than 50 books since the late 1980s.
A Maine native, she drew inspiration for her work from a childhood spent among the woods and rocky beaches of her home state.
“A Gift From the Sea” (2001), illustrated by Georg Hallensleben, follows a boy who finds a rock on a beach, leading him to ruminate on the geological and historical forces that led the rock to that spot. “That’s Papa’s Way” (2009), illustrated by Lauren Castillo, wistfully recounts the story of a young girl’s deepening relationship with her father during a languid day fishing together on a lake.
“This dialogue with nature has accompanied me through adulthood, and it’s an important theme running through many of my books,” she said in a 2013 interview with blogger Melissa Buron. “I think that getting children to explore and engage in their natural habitat can help them to understand their place in the world, not only as residents, but as part of a big, beautiful whole.”
Banks, with Hallensleben, won the picture book award from The Horn Book, a youth literature magazine, in 1998 for “And If the Moon Could Talk,” about a girl slipping into reveries of imagination as her father reads her a bedtime story. Two years later, her middle grade novel “Howie Bowles, Secret Agent,” about a boy who adopts a dashing alter ego on his way to finding true self-acceptance, won the Edgar Award for best juvenile book.
From all appearances, Banks lived a charmed life. When she was in her 30s, she lived in Rome with her Italian-born husband, Pierluigi Mezzomo, a civil engineer and entrepreneur, and their two sons, Peter and Max.
When she was in her 40s, the family moved to the Côte d’Azur in France. A 2008 article in The New York Times chronicled the couple’s renovation of their stately hillside house, Villa Bois Joli (Pretty Wood), with its sun-dappled white exterior and pale blue shutters, bountiful apricot and pear trees and stunning view of the sea.
“The colors, the smells, the views, that’s what makes inspiration come,” Banks told the Times. “And it comes a lot in that house.”
Things were far from perfect, however. As her sister Amy put it in an email: “From the outside looking in, Kate’s life seemed carefree, romantic, even enviable. But the hard stuff she endured was just below the surface.”
Katherine Anne Banks was born Feb. 13, 1960, in Farmington, Maine, the second of four children of Ronald Banks, a history professor at the University of Maine, and Helena (Poland) Banks, who managed the home.
By her early teens, Kate was writing short stories and poetry about nature. “I had a vivid imagination from an early age,” she said in an interview with the blog The Picture Book Buzz, “and, for me, words were the ideal vehicle for connecting my inner and outer worlds.”
After graduating from Brewer High School in Maine in 1978, she enrolled in Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
Her life took a devastating turn during her freshman year. On April 12, 1979, her father, who was attending a convention in New Orleans, was walking with a colleague back to his hotel from the French Quarter when two men tried to rob them. During a scuffle, one of the assailants fired a pistol at Ronald Banks, killing him instantly.
A 16-year-old, Isaac Knapper, who lived in a nearby housing project, was charged with the crime and later convicted, but he was exonerated in 1991 and released from prison. Amy Banks, with Knapper, chronicled the tragic tale in the 2015 book “Fighting Time.”
The shooting left deep emotional scars, but Banks continued on, receiving a bachelor’s degree in history in 1982. She then moved to New York City, earned a master’s degree in history from Columbia University and took a job at Knopf Books for Young Readers in 1984. She published her first children’s book, “Alphabet Soup,” four years later, about a boy who refuses to eat his soup, but taps into a world of wonder by the words that appear in its floating letters.
The hollowness of loss eventually found its way into her work. “Many of my novels for older readers have dealt with death,” she once wrote. “And I suppose that represents my attempts to come to terms with love and loss of that magnitude.”
Banks’ young adult novel “Dillon Dillon” (2002) centers on a boy who learns that the people whom he thought were his parents are actually his aunt and uncle, and that his actual parents died in an accident when he was young. He rediscovers a sense of freedom and wonder while paddling a red rowboat to an island on a lake, where he becomes enchanted with a pair of loons.
In “Walk Softly, Rachel” (2003), a young girl reads the diary of her dead brother, only to learn that he died by suicide.
Banks managed to maintain a strict daily writing schedule for years, despite a chronic fatigue syndrome diagnosis in her 20s and at times crippling pain from a botched medical procedure for a prolapsed uterus from childbirth.
With the complications of mast cell activation syndrome, including drops in blood pressure, flushing, severe itching and rashes, Banks relied on countless alternative therapies, including reiki, hypnosis, emotional freedom technique and quantum healing and regression therapy.
In addition to her sister Amy, she is survived by her husband, her sons and another sister, Nancy Banks.
During the coronavirus pandemic, she found another form of therapy — poetry. Her first anthology, “Into the Ether,” is scheduled to be published this fall.
One poem from the book, “What He Did to Me,” begins, “That guy pulled out of his pocket/ a Saturday Night Special,” and then details the crushing emotional fallout from the bullet that killed her father. But the loss also led to a rebirth:
I began to see God everywhere,
in my neighbor’s smoking chimney,
the crackle of melting frost,
the twist of a climbing vine,
the leap of a cat.
I saw God in every person who passed.
That’s what that guy did to me.
And I ought to be grateful.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
