Colm Tóibín

Irish novelist and writer (born 1955)

This article is about the novelist. For the screenwriter and television producer, see Colm Tobin.

Colm Tóibín

FRSL

Tóibín in 2006

Chancellor of the University of Liverpool
In office
2 February 2017 – 2022
Succeeded by| Wendy Beetlestone
Personal details
Born|  (1955-05-30) 30 May 1955 (age 69)
Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland
Alma mater| UCD
Occupation|

* Journalist
* essayist
* novelist
* short story writer

Website| colmtoibin.com
Writing career
Language| English (Hiberno-English)
Genre| Essay, Novel, Short Story, Play, Poem
Subject| Irish society, living abroad, creativity, personal identity
Notable works|

* The Heather Blazing
* The Story of the Night
* The Blackwater Lightship
* The Master
* The Testament of Mary
* Brooklyn
* Nora Webster
* The Magician

Notable awards| Encore Award
1993
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
2004
International Dublin Literary Award
2006
Irish PEN Award
2011
Hawthornden Prize
2015
Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature
2019
David Cohen Prize
2021
Folio Prize
2022

Colm Tóibín FRSL (/ˈkʌləm toʊˈbiːn/ KUL-əm toh-BEEN,[1] Irish: [ˈkɔl̪ˠəmˠ t̪ˠoːˈbʲiːnʲ]; born 30 May 1955) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.[2][3]

His first novel, The South, was published in 1990. The Blackwater Lightship was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Master (a fictionalised version of the inner life of Henry James) was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 2006 International Dublin Literary Award, securing for Toíbín a bounty of thousands of euro as it is one of the richest literary awards in the world. Nora Webster won the Hawthornden Prize, whilst The Magician (a fictionalised version of the life of Thomas Mann) won the Folio Prize. His fellow artists elected him to Aosdána and he won the biennial "UK and Ireland Nobel"[4] David Cohen Prize in 2021.

He succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. He was Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 2017–2022. He is now Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University in Manhattan.

## Early years

[edit]

Tóibín was born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland.[1] He is the fourth of five children.[5] He was reared in Parnell Avenue.[6] His parents were Bríd and Michael Tóibín.[7] He is one of the two youngest children in his family, alongside his brother Niall.[1][8]

His grandfather, Patrick Tobin, participated in the Easter Rising in April 1916, and was subsequently interned at Frongoch in Wales, while an uncle was involved in the IRB during the Irish Civil War.[1] Following the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922, Tóibín's family favoured the Fianna Fáil political party.[1]

Tóibín grew up in a home where there was, he said, "a great deal of silence".[9] Unable to read until the age of nine, he also developed a stammer.[10] When he was eight years of age, in 1963, his father became ill and his mother – sending her two youngest sons to stay with an aunt in County Kildare \- for three months, so that she could take their father to Dublin for medical care; she did not call or write to her two youngest sons while tending their father.[1] Tóibín traces the stammer he developed to this time – a stammer which would often leave him unable to speak his own name, and which he retained throughout his life.[1] Tóibín's father – who worked as a schoolteacher – died in 1967, when his son was twelve years of age.[1]

Tóibín received his secondary education at St Peter's College, Wexford, where he was a boarder between 1970 and 1972. He later spoke of finding some of the priests attractive.[11] He was also an altar boy in his youth.[8]

Tóibín went to University College Dublin (UCD), first attending history and English lectures there in 1972,[1] before graduating with a BA in 1975. He thought about becoming a civil servant but decided against this.[1] Instead, he left Ireland for Barcelona in 1975, later commenting: "I arrive the 24th of September 1975. Franco dies 20th November".[1] The city would later feature in some of Tóibín's early work: his first novel, 1990's The South, has two characters meeting in Barcelona.[1] His 1990 non-fiction work Homage to Barcelona also references the city in its title.

Tóibín left Barcelona in 1978 and came back to Ireland.[1] He began writing for In Dublin.[1] Tóibín became editor of the monthly news magazine Magill[6] in 1982, and remained in the position until 1985. He left due to a dispute with Vincent Browne, Magill's managing director. In 1997, when The New Yorker asked Tóibín to write about Seamus Heaney becoming President of Ireland, Tóibín noted that Heaney's popularity could survive the "kiss of death" of an endorsement by Conor Cruise O'Brien. The New Yorker telephoned Conor Cruise O'Brien to confirm that this was so, but Cruise O'Brien disagreed and the statement could not be corroborated.[12]

## Personal life

[edit]

Tóibín is gay.[13] Since c. 2012, Tóibín has been in a relationship with Hedi El Kholti, an editor of the literary press Semiotext(e). They share a home in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.[14][1] He has served as a curator of exhibits for the Manhattan-based Morgan Library & Museum.[1] He has judged both the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Giller Prize.[15] Tóibín does not watch television, and his awareness of British parliamentary politics can be summed up by his admission that he thought Ed Balls was a nickname for the then Labour Party leader Ed Miliband.[16] He is interested in tennis and plays the game for leisure; upon meeting Roger Federer, Tóibín enquired as to his opinion on the second serve.[1]

As of 2008, he had family in Enniscorthy, including two sisters (Barbara and Nuala) and a brother (Brendan).[6]

Tóibín lives in Southside Dublin City's Upper Pembroke Street, where on occasions his friends — such as playwright Tom Murphy and former Gate Theatre director Michael Colgan — assembled for social interaction and entertainment.[17][18] Tóibín spent his prize money from his 2006 International Dublin Literary Award on building a house near Blackwater, County Wexford, where he holidayed as a child.[1] He filled this house with artwork and expensive furniture.[1] He possesses a personal key to the private gated park at Dublin's Fitzwilliam Square, which is shut to ordinary members of the public.[1]

In 2019, Tóibín spoke about having survived testicular cancer, which spread to multiple organs, including a lung, liver, and lymph node.[19][20]

## Influences

[edit]

Tóibin calls Henry James his favourite novelist; he is especially fond of The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.[21] Tóibin fictionalized James in his novel The Master.

He would later fictionalize Thomas Mann in The Magician. He is especially fond of Buddenbrooks — which he first read in his late teens — and has also read The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus and the novella Death in Venice.[1]

Tóibin's non-fiction was influenced by Joan Didion and Norman Mailer.[1] He said decades after the publication of his debut novel, The South, "If you look at it, you see that the sentence structure is more or less taken from Didion", and expressed reservations about its quality.[1]

In July 1972, aged 17, he had a summer job as a barman in the Grand Hotel in Tramore, County Waterford, working from six in the evening to two in the morning. He spent his days on the beach, reading The Essential Hemingway, the copy of which he still professes to have, its "pages stained with seawater". The book developed in him a fascination with Spain, led to a wish to visit that country, and gave him "an idea of prose as something glamorous, smart and shaped, and the idea of character in fiction as something oddly mysterious, worthy of sympathy and admiration, but also elusive. And more than anything, the sheer pleasure of the sentences and their rhythms, and the amount of emotion living in what was not said, what was between the words and the sentences."[22]

Eavan Boland introduced him to the poetry of Louise Glück while Boland and Tóibín were at Stanford together in the 2000s.[23] Tóibín stated in 2017 that "there are a few books of mine that I have written since then that I don't think I could have written had it not been for that encounter".[23] When Glück was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, Tóibín immediately wrote an article in praise of her and had it published.[24]

## Writing

[edit]

Tóibín has said his writing comes out of silence. He does not favour stories and does not view himself as a storyteller. He has said, "Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abruptly".[3] When working on a first draft he covers only the right-hand side of the page; later he carries out some rewriting on the left-hand side of the page. He keeps a word processor in another room on which to transfer writing at a later time.[25]

He writes in great discomfort, saying in 2017: "When you're writing, you should be bent over, and you need to be in pain and your shoulders should be bent — you need to be pulling things up from within yourself. You can't be too comfortable."[23]

Tóibín's 1990 novel The South was followed by The Heather Blazing (1992), The Story of the Night (1996), and The Blackwater Lightship (1999). His fifth novel, The Master (2004), is a fictional account of the inner life of Henry James. U.S. writer Cynthia Ozick said that his "rendering of the first hints, or sensations, of the tales as they form in James's thoughts is itself an instance of writer's wizardry".[1] In 2009, he published Brooklyn, which was made into a movie in 2015. Its protagonist is Eilis Lacey, who emigrates from Ireland to Brooklyn. In 2012 Tóibín published The Testament of Mary, and in 2014 he published Nora Webster, a portrait of a recently widowed mother of four in Wexford struggling through a period of grief.[3] A sequel to Brooklyn titled Long Island was released in May 2024, described by a review in Guardian as "a masterclass in subtlety and intelligence". The novel follows Eilis Lacey as she returns to Enniscorthy.[26][27]

Tóibín has written two short story collections. His first, Mothers and Sons, which — as the name suggests — explores the relationship between mothers and their sons, was published in 2006, and was reviewed favourably (including by Pico Iyer in The New York Times). His second collection, titled The Empty Family, was published in 2010.[28] It was shortlisted for the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.[29]

Tóibín has written many non-fiction books, including Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (1994) (reprinted from the 1987 original edition) and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994). He has written for the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books and The Dublin Review, among other publications. Asked in 2021 how many articles he had written, Tóibín was uncertain: "I suppose thousands might be accurate".[1] His article writing also contributed to his reputation as a literary critic; he edited a book on Paul Durcan, The Kilfenora Teaboy (1997), as well as The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999), and with Carmen Callil he wrote The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950 (1999). He wrote a collection of essays, Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar (2002), and a study on Lady Gregory, Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (2002). In his 2012 essay collection New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families he studies the biographies of James Baldwin, J. M. Synge, and W. B. Yeats, among others.[30] In 2015, he released On Elizabeth Bishop, a critical study that made The Guardian's Best Books of 2015 list twice.[31] In June 2016, Tóibín visited Israel, as part of a project by the "Breaking the Silence" organization, to write an article for a book on the Israeli occupation, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War.[32][33] The book was edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, and was published in June 2017 under the title Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation.[34]

Tóibín's play, Beauty in a Broken Place, was staged in Dublin in August 2004. He first wrote poetry while attending secondary school in Wexford.[1] In 2011, The Times Literary Supplement published his poem "Cush Gap, 2007".[2] The December 2021 issue of The New York Review of Books included his poem "Father & Son",[35] which may be autobiographical, as the description of the son's developing a stammer in the second stanza—particularly on hard consonants—is similar to Tóibín's description of his own stammer.[36]

His personal notes and workbooks are deposited at the National Library of Ireland.[37]

## Lecturing

[edit]

Tóibín has been a visiting professor at Stanford University,[6] The University of Texas at Austin[6] and Princeton University. He has also lectured at several other universities, including Middlebury College, Boston College,[6] New York University,[6] Loyola University Maryland, and The College of the Holy Cross. In 2017 he lectured in Athens, Georgia as the University of Georgia Chair for Global Understanding.[38] He was a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester, succeeding Martin Amis in that post,[39] and currently teaches at Columbia University.

Commenting on the absence of gay students from his lectures, Tóibín said: "Whatever aura I have, it's not as a gay guru—I'm not Edmund White. 'My mother's reading your book'—I get that a lot".[1]

In 2015, ahead of a referendum on marriage in Ireland, Tóibín delivered a talk titled "The Embrace of Love: Being Gay in Ireland Now" in Trinity Hall, featuring Roger Casement's diaries, the work of Oscar Wilde, John Broderick, Kate O'Brien, and Senator David Norris's 1980s High Court battles.[40]

He was appointed Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 2017.[41]

## Publishing imprint

[edit]

Tóibín founded the Dublin-based publishing imprint, Tuskar Rock Press, with his agent Peter Straus.[1]

## Themes

[edit]

Tóibín's work explores a number of main themes: the depiction of Irish society, living in exile, the legacy of Catholicism, the process of creativity, and the preservation of a personal identity, masculinity, fatherhood and homosexual identity, and on personal identity when confronted by loss. The "Wexford" novels (The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship) use Enniscorthy, the town of Tóibín's birth, as narrative material, together with the history of Ireland and the death of his father. An autobiographical account and reflection on this episode can be found in the non-fiction book, The Sign of the Cross. In 2009, he published Brooklyn, a tale of a woman emigrating to Brooklyn from Enniscorthy; characters from that novel also appear in Nora Webster, in which the young character of Donal seems to have been part-based on Colm's own childhood. Two other novels, The Story of the Night and The Master, revolve around characters who have to deal with a homosexual identity and take place outside Ireland for the most part, with a character having to cope with living abroad. His first novel, The South, seems to have ingredients for both lines of work. It can be read together with The Heather Blazing as a diptych of Protestant and Catholic heritages in County Wexford, or it can be grouped with the "living abroad" novels. A third topic that links The South and The Heather Blazing is that of creation, of painting in the first case and of the careful wording of a judge's verdict in the second. This third thematic line culminated in The Master, a study on identity, preceded by a non-fiction book on the same subject, Love in a Dark Time. The book of short stories Mothers and Sons deals with family themes, both in Ireland and Catalonia, and homosexuality. As described by The New Yorker in 2021, his characters are "careful in conversation, each utterance fraught with importance... [his] novels typically depict an unfinished battle between those who know what they feel and those who don't, between those who have found a taut peace within themselves and those who remain unsettled. His prose relies on economical gestures and moments of listening, and is largely shorn of metaphor and explanation".[1]

Tóibín has written gay sex into several novels, and Brooklyn contains a heterosexual sex scene in which the heroine loses her virginity.[42]

Bernard Schwartz informed Tóibin after The Magician was published that eight of his novels feature "someone tak[ing] a swim in cold water and hesitat[ing] before they go in" – Thomas Mann, the protagonist in The Magician, is sent swimming in the Baltic Sea.[1] Tóibín had not previously noticed this.[1]

## Awards and honours

[edit]

Tóibín's fellow artists elected him to Aosdána, which is supported by the Arts Council.[43]

Arts Council director Mary Cloake called Tóibín "a champion of minorities" as he collected the 2011 Irish PEN Award.[44]

In 2017, Tóibin objected to the wording of an Arts Council letter, which was attempting to regulate artists and force them to produce a constant supply of work if they wanted to be paid a basic income (which would also be withdrawn if they were "temporarily incapacitated due to ill-health").[45] Tóibín wrote: "The first problem with this, as I'm sure you will agree, is that the phrase 'working artists engaged in productive practice' sounds oddly North Korean, or is like a phrase that could have been used by Stalin about recalcitrant farmers in the Soviet Union."[45] Tóibín noted that W. B. Yeats had heart disease which incapacitated him in later life, yet days before his death, he wrote his poem "Cuchulain Comforted", which Tóibín called "one of the greatest poems in the English language."[45] Tóibín also enquired of the Arts Council: "In the case of James Joyce, who 'produced' nothing between 1922 and 1939, what would you have done?"[45] He referred to his personal experience with another writer: "I draw your attention to the fact that John McGahern published no novel between 1979 and 1990. I know, because I was in regular touch with him during some of those years, how much he struggled, but he 'produced' no novel... would you really have sent 'auditors' down to Leitrim to do 'a sample audit' of what he was doing?"[45]

In 2011, John Naughton, of The Observer, included Tóibín in his list of Britain's three hundred "public figures leading our cultural discourse" — despite Tóibín, like Naughton, being Irish:[46]

* 1993: Encore Award for a second novel, The Heather Blazing[47]
* 1999: Booker Prize shortlist, for The Blackwater Lightship[47]
* 2001: International Dublin Literary Award shortlist, for The Blackwater Lightship[48]
* 2004: Booker Prize shortlist, for The Master[47]
* 2004: Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, for The Master[49]
* 2004: The New York Times, as one of the ten most notable books of the year, for The Master[47]
* 2005: Lambda Literary Award, for The Master[50]
* 2005: Stonewall Book Award, for The Master[51]
* 2006: International Dublin Literary Award, for The Master[47]
* 2007: Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature[52]
* 2008: Honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) from the University of Ulster, in recognition of his contribution to contemporary Irish literature[6]
* 2009: Booker Prize longlist, for Brooklyn[53]
* 2009: Costa Novel Award, for Brooklyn[54]
* 2010: Awarded the 38th annual AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award[47]
* 2011: International Dublin Literary Award shortlist, for Brooklyn[55]
* 2011: Irish PEN Award, for contribution to Irish literature[39]
* 2011: Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award shortlist, for The Empty Family.[29][56][57]
* 2013: Booker Prize shortlist, for The Testament of Mary[58]
* 2014: Named as a trustee to The Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry, which awards the Griffin Poetry Prize
* 2015: Hawthornden Prize, for Nora Webster[59]
* 2017: The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award[60]
* 2017: Honorary doctorate from the Open University, for services to the arts and sciences[61]
* 2017: The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement[23]
* 2019: Premio Malaparte (Italy)[62]
* 2019: Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award[63]
* 2021: Notable Book, Critics' Top Book, and Top 10 Book of Historical Fiction by The New York Times, for The Magician[64]
* 2021: Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, for The Magician[64]
* 2021: David Cohen Prize for Literature[65]
* 2022: Folio Prize, for The Magician[66]

## Selected bibliography

[edit]

### Novels

[edit]

* The South, Serpent's Tail, 1990, ISBN 978-0-330-32333-8
* The Heather Blazing, Picador, 1992, ISBN 978-0-330-32125-9
* The Story of the Night, Picador, 1996, ISBN 978-0-330-34017-5
* The Blackwater Lightship, McClelland and Stewart, 1999, ISBN 978-0-7710-8561-1
* The Master, Picador, 2004, ISBN 978-0-330-48565-4
* Brooklyn, Dublin: Tuskar Rock Press, 2009, ISBN 978-3-446-23566-3
* The Testament of Mary, Viking, 2012, ISBN 978-1451688382
* Nora Webster, Scribner, 2014, ISBN 978-1439138335
* House of Names, Scribner, 2017, ISBN 978-1501140211
* The Magician, Scribner, 2021, ISBN 978-0241004616
* Long Island: A Novel, Picador, 2024, ISBN 978-1-03-502944-0; Scribner, 2024, ISBN 978-1-4767-8511-0

### Short fiction

[edit]

Collections

* Mothers and Sons, Picador, 2006, ISBN 978-0-330-44182-7
* The Empty Family, Penguin/Viking, 2010, ISBN 978-0-670-91817-1

Stories
Title  | Year  | First published  | Reprinted/collected  | Notes

|
|
|
|

"Barcelona, 1975"  | 2005  | The Dublin Review[67] |  | On the first orgy that Toibín attended at the age of twenty, at the house of an older painter. "The story is entirely real", Tóibín later said.[1]
"One Minus One"  | 2007  | Tóibín, Colm (30 April 2007). "One Minus One". The New Yorker. Vol. 91, no. 5\. pp. 78–83. |  | About the death of his mother[1]
"Sleep"  | 2015  | Tóibín, Colm (23 March 2015). "Sleep". The New Yorker. Vol. 91, no. 5\. pp. 78–83. |  |
"Summer of '38"  | 2013  | Tóibín, Colm (4 March 2013). "Summer of '38". The New Yorker. Vol. 89, no. 3\. pp. 58–65. |  |

### Non-fiction

[edit]

* Walking Along the Border. With photographs by Tony O'Shea. London: Macdonald. 1987. ISBN 9780356172484.`{{cite book}}`: CS1 maint: others (link) (republished in 1994 without photographs as Bad Blood).
* Martyrs and Metaphors, Letters from the New Island, vol. 1, no. 2., Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1987, ISBN 978-1-85186-036-4
* The Trial of the Generals: Selected Journalism, 1980–1990, Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1990, ISBN 978-1-85186-081-4
* Homage to Barcelona, Simon & Schuster, 1990, ISBN 978-0-671-71061-3 (revised edition Picador, 2002, ISBN 978-0-330-37356-2)
* Dubliners, O'Shea, Tony (illus.), London: Macdonald, 1990, ISBN 0-356-17641-X`{{citation}}`: CS1 maint: others (link)
* Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border, Picador, 1994, ISBN 978-0-330-52097-3
* The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe, Jonathan Cape, 1994, ISBN 978-0-224-03767-9
* Tóibín, Colm, ed. (1995), The Guinness Book of Ireland, Guinness World Records, ISBN 978-0-85112-597-8
* Tóibín, Colm, ed. (1996), The Kilfenora Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan, New Island Books, ISBN 978-1-874597-31-5
* Tóibín, Colm; Callil, Carmel (1999), The Modern Library: The Two Hundred Best Novels in English Since 1950, Picador, ISBN 978-0-330-34182-0
* Tóibín, Colm, ed. (1999), The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction, Penguin/Viking, ISBN 978-0-670-85497-4
* Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives From Wilde to Almodovar, Picador, 2002, ISBN 978-0-330-49137-2 (First English edition; Australian edition published 2001)
* The Irish Famine. A Documentary. With Diarmaid Ferriter, Profile Books Limited, 2001. ISBN 9781861972491
* Lady Gregory's Toothbrush, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-299-18000-3
* Schneider, Gregor; O'Hagan, Andrew; Tóibín, Colm (2004), Die Familie Schneider, Artangel, ISBN 978-3-86521-236-8
* The Use of Reason, Picador, 2006, ISBN 978-0-330-44573-3[68]
* Sean Scully: Walls of Aran, Thames & Hudson, 2007, ISBN 978-0-500-54339-9[69]
* A Guest at the Feast. A Memoir, Penguin, 2011, ISBN 978-0-241-96229-9[70]
* New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their Families, Penguin, 2012, ISBN 978-1-4516-6855-1
* On Elizabeth Bishop, Princeton University Press, 2015, ISBN 9780691154114
* Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce, Scribner, 2018, ISBN 978-1476785172
* A Guest at the Feast: Essays, Viking, 2022, ISBN 9780241004630
* "Freud and the Writers", in Blauner, Andrew, ed., On the Couch: Writers Analyze Sigmund Freud, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024, ISBN 9780691242439

### Book reviews

[edit]

Year  | Review article  | Work(s) reviewed

|
|

2018  | Tóibín, Colm (22 February 2018). "The Heart of Conrad". The New York Review of Books. Vol. 65, no. 3\. pp. 8–11. | Jasanoff, Maya. The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. Penguin.

## Filmography

[edit]

* 2017 Return to Montauk (writer)
* 2015 Brooklyn

## See also

[edit]

* Catholicism portal
* Ireland portal
* LGBTQ portal
* Literature portal
* Novels portal
* Writing portal

* LGBT culture in New York City
* List of LGBT people from New York City
* NYC Pride March

## References

[edit]

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag Max, D. T. (20 September 2021). "How Colm Tóibín Burrowed Inside Thomas Mann's Head". The New Yorker.
2. ^ a b "Toibin tries his hand at poetry . . ". Irish Independent. Dublin. 18 June 2011.
3. ^ a b c Barnett, Laura (19 February 2013). "Colm Tóibín, novelist – portrait of the artist". The Guardian. Retrieved 19 February 2013.
4. ^ Doyle, Martin (26 November 2019). "Edna O'Brien wins the 'UK and Ireland Nobel award' for lifetime achievement: Country Girls author receives £40,000 David Cohen prize which is seen as Nobel precursor". The Irish Times. Dublin. Retrieved 26 November 2019.
5. ^ "Colm Tóibín Biography". Chicago Public Library. 30 April 2010. Retrieved 21 February 2024.
6. ^ a b c d e f g h "Author Toibín receives honorary degree in Ulster". Enniscorthy Guardian. 3 July 2008. Retrieved 28 September 2022.
7. ^ Salter, Jessica (27 February 2012). "The World of Colm Tóibín". The Daily Telegraph. London.
8. ^ a b Witchel, Alex (3 May 2009). "His Irish Diaspora". The New York Times. New York. Archived from the original on 16 July 2016. Retrieved 23 June 2018.
9. ^ Tóibín, Colm (17 February 2012). "Colm Tóibín: writers and their families". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
10. ^ "Colm Toibin: By the Book". The New York Times. New York. 1 October 2015. Retrieved 1 October 2015.
11. ^ "Austen was a woeful speller . . ". Irish Independent. 30 October 2010. "Although not abused by priests in the Wexford school he attended, he positively fancied some of them. 'Aged 15 or 16', he tells interviewer Susanna Rustin, 'I found some of the priests sexually attractive, they had a way about them... a sexual allure which is a difficult thing to talk about because it's usually meant to be the opposite way round'."
12. ^ Foster, R. F. (February 2009). "The Cruiser". Standpoint. Archived from the original on 23 November 2019. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
13. ^ Kaplan, James (6 June 2004). "A Subtle Play of Relations Reveals Henry James in Full". The Observer. Retrieved 16 November 2015.
14. ^ Brockes, Emma (30 March 2018). "Colm Tóibín: 'There's a certain amount of glee at the sheer foolishness of Brexit'". The Guardian. Retrieved 6 May 2021.
15. ^ "Griffin Poetry Prize jury includes Colm Tóibin". Toronto Star. Canada. 1 September 2010. Retrieved 1 September 2010.
16. ^ "Colm Tóibín on the allure of the breakfast fry-up". Dublin: RTÉ. 25 May 2015. Retrieved 10 June 2019.
17. ^ Anderson, Nicola (13 June 2005). "Playwright didn't curry favour in row at party". Irish Independent. Dublin. Retrieved 11 October 2021.
18. ^ "Beware when the enemy's at the Gate". Dublin: Independent.ie. 12 June 2005.
19. ^ "Colm Toibin discusses his battle with testicular cancer". Wexford: South East Radio. 12 April 2019. Retrieved 12 April 2019. "Mr Toibin has had ongoing treatment for the cancer which also showed up in his lung and liver."
20. ^ "Famed Irish writer Colm Toibin tells of secret cancer battle". New York: IrishCentral. 15 April 2019. Retrieved 15 April 2019. "A week later the phone rang and I was told that I had a cancer of the testicles that had spread to a lymph node and to one lung."
21. ^ "Colm Toibin: By the Book". The New York Times. 1 October 2015.
22. ^ "The best holiday reads: Colm Tóibín". The Guardian. 17 June 2011. Retrieved 17 June 2011.
23. ^ a b c d Nolan, Dan; Crawford, Kevin (16 November 2017). "On the Record: Colm Tóibín". Kenyon Collegian. Retrieved 28 September 2022.
24. ^ Tóibín, Colm (9 October 2020). "Louise Glück: Colm Tóibín on a brave and truthful Nobel winner". The Guardian.
25. ^ Tóibín, Colm (13 July 2007). "Writers' rooms: Colm Tóibín". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 September 2021.
26. ^ Self, John (19 May 2024). "Long Island by Colm Tóibín review – the sequel to Brooklyn is a masterclass in subtlety and intelligence". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 20 May 2024.
27. ^ "The best new summer books: newly published holiday reads". The Week UK. 20 July 2024. Retrieved 22 July 2024.
28. ^ "The Empty Family Stories". Archived from the original on 1 November 2019. Retrieved 21 March 2011.
29. ^ a b Cullen, Conor (12 July 2011). "Tóibín in line for major prize". Enniscorthy Guardian. Archived from the original on 4 October 2011. Retrieved 12 July 2011.
30. ^ Hadley, Tessa (22 February 2012). "New Ways to Kill Your Mother by Colm Tóibín – review". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 March 2012.
31. ^ Tóibín, Colm (22 March 2015). On Elizabeth Bishop Colm Tóibín. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691154114. Retrieved 28 December 2015.
32. ^ Laub, Karin (18 July 2016). "50 Years of Israeli Occupation, Told Through the Eyes of an Author: Irish author Colm Toibin toured the West Bank last week to collect material for his contribution to a 2017 anthology". Haaretz.
33. ^ Cain, Sian (22 February 2016). "Leading authors to write about visiting Israel and the occupied territories". The Guardian.
34. ^ "Kingdom of Olives and Ash Writers Confront the Occupation By Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman". Retrieved 18 August 2022.
35. ^ Tóibín, Colm (2 December 2021). "Father & Son". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 11 November 2021.
36. ^ "Colm Toibin: By the Book". The New York Times. 1 October 2015. Retrieved 11 November 2021.
37. ^ Telford, Lyndsey (21 December 2011). "Seamus Heaney declutters home and donates personal notes to National Library". Irish Independent. Dublin. Archived from the original on 2 August 2012.
38. ^ Butschek, H. (2017). "Author of 'Brooklyn' coming for 3 days of events in Athens". Online Athens.
39. ^ a b Walsh, Caroline (4 February 2011). "Colm Tóibín wins Irish Pen award". The Irish Times. Dublin. Retrieved 4 February 2011.
40. ^ Blake Knox, Kirsty (15 May 2015). "'Gay people have a right to ritualise and copper-fasten their love' - Tóibín". Irish Independent. Dublin.
41. ^ Kean, Danuta (2 February 2017). "Colm Tóibín appointed chancellor of Liverpool University". The Guardian. Retrieved 2 February 2017.
42. ^ Rustin, Susanna (16 October 2010). "Let's not talk about sex — why passion is waning in British books". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 October 2010.
43. ^ "Colm Tóibín".
44. ^ Boland, Rosita (12 February 2011). "Tóibín on song as he picks up Irish Pen award". The Irish Times. Dublin. Retrieved 12 February 2011.
45. ^ a b c d e Spain, John (22 April 2017). "Tóibín likens Arts Council to North Korea in row over Aosdána funding". Irish Independent. Dublin. Retrieved 28 September 2022.
46. ^ This loose list quickly became somewhat discredited on account of numerous flagrant inaccuracies and anomalous inclusions (it even included Alan Rusbridger, the then editor-in-chief of The Observer's sister title), and a correction was printed the following Sunday, noting that several of those included "would not claim to be British" (most notably Seamus Heaney and Tóibín), correcting misspelt, and even incorrect, names - e.g. "Andrew (not Anthony)", "David (not Derek)" -, while one inclusion was discovered in the course of that week to have been dead since 1995. See: Naughton, John (8 May 2011). "Britain's top 300 intellectuals". The Observer.
47. ^ a b c d e f "Colm is an author of formidable talent". Wexford People. 29 June 2011.
48. ^ Yates, Emma (16 May 2001). "First novel takes fiction's richest prize". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 6 March 2014. Retrieved 16 May 2001.
49. ^ "2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize — Fiction Winner and Nominees". Awards Archive. 25 March 2020. Retrieved 10 March 2022.
50. ^ Gonzalez Cerna, Antonio (9 July 2005). "17th Annual Lambda Literary Awards". Lambda Literary. Retrieved 15 February 2022.
51. ^ "Stonewall Books Awards List". 2005.
52. ^ "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. Archived from the original on 5 March 2010. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
53. ^ Brown, Mark (28 July 2009). "Heavyweights clash on Booker longlist". The Guardian. Retrieved 28 July 2009.
54. ^ "Tóibín wins Costa Novel Award". RTÉ Arts. Dublin: RTÉ. 4 January 2010. Retrieved 4 January 2010.
55. ^ "William Trevor makes an Impac". The Irish Times. Dublin. 12 April 2011. Archived from the original on 23 October 2012. Retrieved 12 April 2011.
56. ^ Walsh, Caroline (9 July 2011). "Two Irish authors make awards shortlist". The Irish Times. Dublin. Retrieved 9 July 2011.
57. ^ Flood, Alison (9 July 2011). "Strong showing for Irish writers on Frank O'Connor shortlist". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 July 2011.
58. ^ "The Man Booker Prize 2013". 7 August 2013. Archived from the original on 30 November 2014. Retrieved 2 December 2014.
59. ^ Doyle, Martin (23 July 2015). "Colm Tóibín wins Hawthornden Prize for 'Nora Webster'". The Irish Times. Dublin. Retrieved 23 July 2015.
60. ^ "APNewsBreak: Irish novelist wins Ohio literary peace award". The Washington Post. 13 July 2017. Archived from the original on 13 July 2017.
61. ^ Doyle, Simon (20 October 2017). "Colm Tóibín honoured by The Open University". The Irish News. Retrieved 28 September 2022.
62. ^ "Il Malaparte 2019 a Colm Tóibín". Premio Malaparte. Retrieved 25 October 2022.
63. ^ Tóibín, Colm (24 November 2019). "'My arduous journey from imbecile to writer'". Sunday Independent. Dublin. Retrieved 28 September 2022. Edited version of acceptance speech.
64. ^ a b "POSTPONED - Colm Tóibín: A Reading and Talk". Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. 8 April 2022. Retrieved 28 September 2022.
65. ^ Doyle, Martin (13 December 2021). "Colm Tóibín wins David Cohen Prize for Literature 2021: Previous winners of £40,000 award for a lifetime's work have gone on to win Nobel". The Irish Times. Dublin.
66. ^ Knight, Lucy (22 March 2022). "Irish novelist Colm Tóibín wins Rathbones Folio prize for The Magician". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 March 2022.
67. ^ "Remembering sex, books and music – especially sex – on the eve of Franco's death [memoir]". Dublin Review. Spring 2005.
68. ^ http://www.panmacmillan.com/Titles/displayPage.asp?PageTitle=Individual Title&BookID=386178[permanent dead link‍]
69. ^ "Thames & Hudson Publishers | Essential illustrated art books | Sean Scully - Walls of Aran". Archived from the original on 9 January 2015. Retrieved 3 December 2014.
70. ^ "A Guest at the Feast. A Memoir | Colm Tóibín Official Website". www.colmtoibin.com. Archived from the original on 4 February 2012. Retrieved 15 January 2012.

## Sources

[edit]

* Ryan, Ray. Ireland and Scotland: Literature and Culture, State and Nation, 1966–2000. Oxford University Press, 2002.

## Further reading

[edit]

* Allen Randolph, Jody. "Colm Tóibín, December 2009." Close to the Next Moment. Manchester: Carcanet, 2010.
* Boland, Eavan. "Colm Tóibín." Irish Writers on Writing. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2007.
* Costello-Sullivan, Kathleen. Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín. Reimagining Ireland series. Ed. Eamon Maher. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012.
* Cronin, Michael G. 'Revolutionary Bodies: homoeroticism and the political imagination in Irish Writing'. Manchester University Press, 2022.
* Delaney, Paul. Reading Colm Tóibín. Dublin: Liffey Press, 2008, ISBN 978-1-905785-41-4
* Educational Media Solutions, 'Reading Ireland, Contemporary Irish Writers in the Context of Place', 2012, Films Media Group
* Max, D. T. (20 September 2021). "Secrets and Lies: Colm Tóibín Is a Great Talker—Yet His Novels Are Full of People Who Cannot Speak Their Minds". The New Yorker. Vol. 97, no. 29\. pp. 50–59.

## External links

[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to Colm Tóibín.

* Official website
* Colm Tóibín at Aosdána
* Colm Tóibín at British Council: Literature
* Contributions by Tóibín to The New York Review of Books (article archive)
* Biographical profile at The Guardian
* Contributions by Tóibín to The Guardian (article archive)
* Tóibín receiving the 2011 Irish PEN Award – photo credit Alan Betson / The Irish Times
* Interview at Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4, first broadcast 7 January 2016)
* Colm Tóibín at Library of Congress, with 63 library catalogue records

* v
* t
* e

Works by Colm Tóibín

Novels|

* The South (1990)
* The Heather Blazing (1992)
* The Story of the Night (1996)
* The Blackwater Lightship (1999)
* The Master (2004)
* Brooklyn (2009)
* The Testament of Mary (2012)
* Nora Webster (2014)
* House of Names (2017)
* The Magician (2021)
* Long Island: A Novel (2024)

Essay collections|

* Love in a Dark Time (2002)
* New Ways to Kill Your Mother (2012)

Short story collections|

* Mothers and Sons (2006)
* The Empty Family (2010)

Plays|

* Beauty in a Broken Place (2004)

Poetry|

* Cush Gap, 2007 (2011)

Screenplay|

* Return to Montauk (2017)

Non-fiction|

* Bad Blood (1987)
* Homage to Barcelona (1990)
* The Sign of the Cross (1994)
* Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (2002)
* The Use of Reason (2006)

* v
* t
* e

Recipients of the International Dublin Literary Award

* David Malouf (1996)
* Javier Marías / Margaret Jull Costa (1997)
* Herta Müller / Michael Hofmann (1998)
* Andrew Miller (1999)
* Nicola Barker (2000)
* Alistair MacLeod (2001)
* Michel Houellebecq / Frank Wynne (2002)
* Orhan Pamuk / Erdağ Göknar (2003)
* Tahar Ben Jelloun / Linda Coverdale (2004)
* Edward P. Jones (2005)
* Colm Tóibín (2006)
* Per Petterson / Anne Born (2007)
* Rawi Hage (2008)
* Michael Thomas (2009)
* Gerbrand Bakker / David Colmer (2010)
* Colum McCann (2011)
* Jon McGregor (2012)
* Kevin Barry (2013)
* Juan Gabriel Vásquez / Anne McLean (2014)
* Jim Crace (2015)
* Akhil Sharma (2016)
* José Eduardo Agualusa / Daniel Hahn (2017)
* Mike McCormack (2018)
* Emily Ruskovich (2019)
* Anna Burns (2020)
* Valeria Luiselli (2021)
* Alice Zeniter / Frank Wynne (2022)
* Katja Oskamp / Jo Heinrich (2023)
* Mircea Cărtărescu / Sean Cotter (2024)

* v
* t
* e

Great Hunger in Ireland, 1845–1852

General|

* Irish Famine (1740–1741)
* History of Ireland (1801–1923)
* Penal Laws
* Absentee landlord
* Corn Laws
* Chronology of the Great Famine
* British Relief Association
* Souperism
* Coffin ship
* Irish diaspora
* Young Ireland rebellion
* Encumbered Estates' Court
* Legacy of the Great Famine
* National Famine Commemoration Day
* List of memorials to the Great Famine
* 1879 Irish Famine

People|

* Queen Victoria
* Earl Russell
* Viscount Halifax
* Earl of Lucan
* Marquess of Londonderry
* Marquess Conyngham
* Lord Farnham
* Robert Gore-Booth
* Nassau William Senior
* Viscount Palmerston
* Marquess of Lansdowne
* Marquess of Clanricarde
* Charles Trevelyan
* Christopher St George
* Robert Peel
* Lionel de Rothschild
* Stephen Spring Rice
* John Abel Smith
* Paweł Strzelecki
* Matthew James Higgins
* William Henry Gregory

Laws|

* Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1838
* Temporary Relief Act 1847
* Irish Poor Law Extension Acts
* Prevention of Crime (Ireland) Act 1848

Historians|

* John Mitchel
* Cecil Woodham-Smith
* F. S. L. Lyons
* Robert Dudley Edwards
* Joel Mokyr
* Cormac Ó Gráda
* Diarmaid Ferriter
* Colm Tóibín
* Tim Pat Coogan
* Christine Kinealy

Related|

* National Famine Museum
* Highland Potato Famine
* European Potato Failure
* Laissez-faire
* Economic liberalism
* Theories of famines
* Food security
* Malthusianism
* Irish National Land League
* Land War

* Category

Authority control databases

International|

* ISNI
* VIAF
* FAST
* WorldCat

National|

* Germany
* United States
* France
* BnF data
* Japan
* Italy
* Australia
* Czech Republic
* Spain
* Portugal
* Netherlands
* Norway
* Latvia
* Croatia
* Greece
* Korea
* Sweden
* Poland
* Israel
* Catalonia
* Belgium

Academics|

* CiNii

People|

* Deutsche Biographie
* DDB

Other|

* IdRef

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