Dr Garry Bannister was educated at Trinity College Dublin, where he studied Irish and Russian. On a scholarship to Moscow in 1977, he received a degree in Russian language and literature and also completed a PhD in comparative linguistics. He set up the first Department of Modern Irish at Moscow State University in the early 1980s. Upon his return to Ireland, he taught at St Columba's College in Dublin, where he was head of the Irish Department for nearly thirty years. He has also been a visiting lecturer on modern Irish literature at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra.
He has worked on the translations of Irish literary classics such as An tOileánach with David Sowby, Cré na Cille with Alan Titley and Comhrá le Lì Hé with Gabriel Rosenstock. He is the author of Foclóir an Fhoghlaimeora, Labhair Rúisis Liom, Essential Irish, and three earlier editions of his Irish-English Thesaurus.
More recently, his work includes the perennially popular Proverbs in Irish, What's That as Gaeilge? An English-Irish Phrasebook and the first comprehensive translation of classical Zen koans in English and Irish, A Path Home - Conair Siar, and Teasáras Gaeilge-Béarla / Irish-English Thesaurus, a milestone in engagement with the Irish language and its culture, which was nominated for an Irish Book Award.