Colm Tóibín

Abstract

Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford in 1955, the fourth of five children. His childhood was disrupted by the illness of his father Micheál, a teacher, when he was eight. His father’s death four years later in the summer of 1967 occurred just before Tóibín began his secondary school education, after which he entered University College Dublin in 1972 to study English and history. On graduation in 1975 he moved to Barcelona, where he taught English for three years, learned Catalan, and witnessed Spain’s transition to democracy in the aftermath of General Francisco Franco’s death. Following his return to Dublin in 1978, Tóibín embarked on a career in journalism, which culminated in his editorship of Magill magazine between 1982 and 1985. He spent much of the late 1980s abroad, traveling in South America, Africa, and eastern Europe, and returning to Catalonia in 1988 to write Homage to Barcelona (1990), one of three travelogues he published between 1987 and 1994. His novelistic career began in 1990 with The South, set in Ireland and Catalonia, which won the 1991 Irish Times/Aer Lingus First Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. With his next three novels— The Heather Blazing (cited under Novels), The Story of the Night (cited under Novels), and The Blackwater Lightship (cited under Novels)—Tóibín established himself as a highly distinctive voice in contemporary fiction, lauded for the spareness and lucidity of his prose, the delicacy of his psychological realism, and the acuity of his insights into states of exile, silence, loneliness, and grief. The presence of complexly drawn gay protagonists in the last two of these novels also marked Tóibín out as a bold prospector of homosexual identities and intimacies, whose public disclosure of his own gay sexuality in 1993 coincided with the decriminalization of homosexuality in the Republic of Ireland. Within Irish critical circles, the early reception of his work was complicated by Tóibín’s association with historical revisionism and his espousal of a pluralist, post-nationalist society. His fifth novel, The Master (cited under Novels), garnered extensive praise and won the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His 2009 novel, Brooklyn (cited under Novels), won the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His novella, The Testament of Mary (cited under Novels), was also shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2013. In addition to his nine novels, Tóibín has authored two volumes of short stories, three plays, a short memoir, and an impressive body of nonfiction that encompasses historical, biographical, and literary-critical studies. He taught at Princeton University from 2009 to 2011 and was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester in 2011. He is currently Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and Chancellor of the University of Liverpool. Recent honors include the 2017 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award and the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award, presented at the Irish Book Awards in November 2019.