Garry Bannister was born on Larkhill Road in Ballydoogan, Sligo in 1953. He attended Trinity College where he obtained a degree in Irish and Russian in 1977. While continuing his studies on a scholarship at Moscow State University, he completed an MA in Russian Language and Literature, established the first Modern Irish language department in Russia and wrote his Ph. D. in linguistics. The greater part of his professional life was spent as a teacher of Irish at St Columba’s College.

He worked for ten years in collaboration with Dr. David Sowby to produce ‘The Islander’, published by Gill & Macmillan in 2002 and considered to be the definitive translation of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s seminal autobiography: ‘An tOileánach’.

Known primarily as a lexicographer, he compiled the first ‘Russian-Irish Dictionary’ in 1983 and ‘The Learner's Dictionary’ in 2008. ‘The Irish-English Thesaurus', the result of 40 years of study and research and published by New Island in 2023, is recognised as his magnum opus. He has also published numerous language manuals; ‘Labhair Rúisis Liom’, published in 1985 for a Russian course through the medium of Irish which was organised by Foras na Gaeilge in the mid-1980s, and Essential Irish, first published in 2002. He has many other publications in the field of language learning to his name.

He has also published three collections of verse under the pen name Howard Lawn: ‘Songs of the Dead’, ‘Glen’, and ‘Dúiseacht súl’. These include poetry in Irish and other European languages.

“The One who has created me,

who loves me to my core,

He’ll be in me to the very end,

until I am no more.”