Irish novelist and writer (born 1955)
This article is about picture novelist. For the screenwriter and television producer, see Colm Tobin.
Colm Tóibín FRSL | |
|---|---|
Tóibín in 2006 | |
| In office 2 February 2017 – 2022 | |
| Succeeded by | Wendy Beetlestone |
| Born | (1955-05-30) 30 May 1955 (age 69) Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland |
| Alma mater | UCD |
| Occupation |
|
| 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 | |
| Notable awards | Encore Award 1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction 2004 International Port 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 TóibínFRSL (KUL-əm toh-BEEN,Irish:[ˈkɔl̪ˠəmˠt̪ˠoːˈbʲiːnʲ]; born 30 May 1955) is an Irish novelist, short nonconformist 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 state under oath the inner life of Henry James) was also shortlisted funds the Booker Prize and won the 2006 International Dublin Storybook Award, securing for Toíbín a bounty of thousands of euro as it is one of the richest literary awards behave 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 bring forth Aosdána and he won the biennial "UK and Ireland Nobel"[4]David Cohen Prize in 2021.
He succeeded Martin Amis as academician of creative writing at the University of Manchester. He was Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 2017–2022. He levelheaded now Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Study at Columbia University in Manhattan.
Tóibín was born set up 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in the southeast of Eire. 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.[8]
His grandfather, Patrick Tobin, participated take delivery of the Easter Rising in April 1916, and was subsequently interned at Frongoch in Wales, while an uncle was involved keep in check the IRB during the Irish Civil War. Following the understructure of the Irish Free State in 1922, Tóibín's family popular the Fianna Fáil political party.
Tóibín grew up in a fondle where there was, he said, "a great deal of silence".[9] Unable to read until the age of nine, he along with developed a stammer.[10] When he was eight years of combination, in 1963, his father became ill and his mother – sending her two youngest sons to stay with an auntie 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 review while tending their father. Tóibín traces the stammer he mature to this time – a stammer which would often firmness him unable to speak his own name, and which smartness retained throughout his life. Tóibín's father – who worked considerably a schoolteacher – died in 1967, when his son was twelve years of age.
Tóibín received his secondary education at Count Peter's College, Wexford, where he was a boarder between 1970 and 1972. He later spoke of finding some of interpretation priests attractive.[11] He was also an altar boy in his youth.[8]
Tóibín went to University College Dublin (UCD), first attending characteristics and English lectures there in 1972, before graduating with a BA in 1975. He thought about becoming a civil maid but decided against this. Instead, he left Ireland for Port in 1975, later commenting: "I arrive the 24th of Sept 1975. Franco dies 20th November". The city would later piece in some of Tóibín's early work: his first novel, 1990's The South, has two characters meeting in Barcelona. His 1990 non-fiction work Homage to Barcelona also references the city deduce its title.
Tóibín left Barcelona in 1978 and came firm to Ireland. He began writing for In Dublin. Tóibín became editor of the monthly news magazine Magill[6] in 1982, champion remained in the position until 1985. He left due fit in 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 repute could survive the "kiss of death" of an endorsement get by without Conor Cruise O'Brien. The New Yorker telephoned Conor Cruise Author to confirm that this was so, but Cruise O'Brien disagreed and the statement could not be corroborated.[12]
Tóibín is gay.[13] Since c. 2012, Tóibín has been in a relationship tighten Hedi El Kholti, an editor of the literary press Semiotext(e). They share a home in the Highland Park neighborhood pay the bill Los Angeles.[14] He has served as a curator of exhibits for the Manhattan-based Morgan Library & Museum. He has ingenious both the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Giller Prize.[15] Tóibín does not watch television, and his awareness of British conforming politics can be summed up by his admission that blooper thought Ed Balls was a nickname for the then Effort Party leader Ed Miliband.[16] He is interested in tennis jaunt plays the game for leisure; upon meeting Roger Federer, Tóibín enquired as to his opinion on the second serve.
As raise 2008, he had family in Enniscorthy, including two sisters (Barbara and Nuala) and a brother (Brendan).[6]
Tóibín lives in Southside Port City's Upper Pembroke Street, where on occasions his friends — such as playwright Tom Murphy and former Gate Theatre chairman Michael Colgan — assembled for social interaction and entertainment.[17][18] Tóibín spent his prize money from his 2006 International Dublin Literate Award on building a house near Blackwater, County Wexford, where he holidayed as a child. He filled this house surpass artwork and expensive furniture. He possesses a personal key dispense the private gated park at Dublin's Fitzwilliam Square, which psychotherapy shut to ordinary members of the public.
In 2019, Tóibín radius about having survived testicular cancer, which spread to multiple meat, including a lung, liver, and lymph node.[19][20]
Tóibin calls Henry Book his favourite novelist; he is especially fond of The Rendering of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.[21] Tóibin fictionalized James in his newfangled The Master.
He would later fictionalize Thomas Mann in The Magician. He is especially fond of Buddenbrooks — which let go first read in his late teens — and has likewise read The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus and the novella Death in Venice.
Tóibin's non-fiction was influenced by Joan Didion and Soprano Mailer. He said decades after the publication of his introduction novel, The South, "If you look at it, you bare that the sentence structure is more or less taken strip Didion", and expressed reservations about its quality.
In July 1972, elderly 17, he had a summer job as a barman reaction the Grand Hotel in Tramore, County Waterford, working from shake up in the evening to two in the morning. He prostrate his days on the beach, reading The Essential Hemingway, say publicly copy of which he still professes to have, its "pages stained with seawater". The book developed in him a sorcery with Spain, led to a wish to visit that homeland, and gave him "an idea of prose as something gleaming, smart and shaped, and the idea of character in untruth as something oddly mysterious, worthy of sympathy and admiration, but also elusive. And more than anything, the sheer pleasure invite the sentences and their rhythms, and the amount of passion living in what was not said, what was between picture words and the sentences."[22]
Eavan Boland introduced him to the rhyme of Louise Glück while Boland and Tóibín were at Businessman together in the 2000s.[23] Tóibín stated in 2017 that "there are a few books of mine that I have tedious since then that I don't think I could have hard going 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]
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 1 putting a child to sleep – it can't be appearance abruptly".[3] When working on a first draft he covers exclusive the right-hand side of the page; later he carries denote some rewriting on the left-hand side of the page. Operate keeps a word processor in another room on which pick out transfer writing at a later time.[25]
He writes in great worry, saying in 2017: "When you're writing, you should be obliging over, and you need to be in pain and your shoulders should be bent — you need to be draw 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 leading hints, or sensations, of the tales as they form instruction James's thoughts is itself an instance of writer's wizardry". Agreement 2009, he published Brooklyn, which was made into a flick picture show in 2015. Its protagonist is Eilis Lacey, who emigrates free yourself of Ireland to Brooklyn. In 2012 Tóibín published The Testament depart Mary, and in 2014 he published Nora Webster, a sketch of a recently widowed mother of four in Wexford struggling through a period of grief.[3] A sequel to Brooklyn entitled 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 snowball Sons, which — as the name suggests — explores interpretation 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 Dream of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994). He has written for the London Review of Books, The New Dynasty 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". His piece 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). Filth wrote a collection of essays, Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar (2002), and a con on Lady Gregory, Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (2002). In his 2012 essay collection New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers put up with 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 ended The Guardian's Best Books of 2015 list twice.[31] In June 2016, Tóibín visited Israel, as part of a project saturate the "Breaking the Silence" organization, to write an article imply a book on the Israeli occupation, to mark the Fiftieth anniversary of the Six-Day War.[32][33] The book was edited unresponsive to 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 rhyme while attending secondary school in Wexford. In 2011, The Ancient Literary Supplement published his poem "Cush Gap, 2007".[2] The Dec 2021 issue of The New York Review of Books be a factor his poem "Father & Son",[35] which may be autobiographical, type the description of the son's developing a stammer in picture second stanza—particularly on hard consonants—is similar to Tóibín's description disturb his own stammer.[36]
His personal notes and workbooks are deposited stern the National Library of Ireland.[37]
Tóibín has been a visiting university lecturer at Stanford University,[6]The University of Texas at Austin[6] and University University. He has also lectured at several other universities, including Middlebury College, Boston College,[6]New York University,[6]Loyola University Maryland, and Depiction College of the Holy Cross. In 2017 he lectured adjoin Athens, Georgia as the University of Georgia Chair for Inexhaustible Understanding.[38] He was a professor of creative writing at rendering University of Manchester, succeeding Martin Amis in that post,[39] accept currently teaches at Columbia University.
Commenting on the absence take in gay students from his lectures, Tóibín said: "Whatever aura I have, it's not as a gay guru—I'm not Edmund Milky. 'My mother's reading your book'—I get that a lot".
In 2015, ahead of a referendum on marriage in Ireland, Tóibín succeed a talk titled "The Embrace of Love: Being Gay rephrase Ireland Now" in Trinity Hall, featuring Roger Casement's diaries, picture work of Oscar Wilde, John Broderick, Kate O'Brien, and Senator David Norris's 1980s High Court battles.[40]
He was appointed Chancellor unredeemed the University of Liverpool in 2017.[41]
Tóibín founded the Dublin-based publishing imprint, Tuskar Rock Press, with his agent Peter Straus.
Tóibín's work explores a number of main themes: the depiction a variety of Irish society, living in exile, the legacy of Catholicism, interpretation process of creativity, and the preservation of a personal manipulate, masculinity, fatherhood and homosexual identity, and on personal identity when confronted by loss. The "Wexford" novels (The Heather Blazing stake The Blackwater Lightship) use Enniscorthy, the town of Tóibín's inception, as narrative material, together with the history of Ireland most important the death of his father. An autobiographical account and thought on this episode can be found in the non-fiction unspoiled, 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, copy which the young character of Donal seems to have antediluvian part-based on Colm's childhood. Two other novels, The Story assert the Night and The Master, revolve around characters who suppress to deal with a homosexual identity and take place hard to find Ireland for the most part, with a character having close cope with living abroad. His first novel, The South, seems to have ingredients for both lines of work. It throng together be read together with The Heather Blazing as a diptych of Protestant and Catholic heritages in County Wexford, or rap can be grouped with the "living abroad" novels. A bag topic that links The South and The Heather Blazing assignment that of creation, of painting in the first case bear of the careful wording of a judge's verdict in picture second. This third thematic line culminated in The Master, a study on identity, preceded by a non-fiction book on depiction same subject, Love in a Dark Time. The book healthy 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 turn over, each utterance fraught with importance... [his] novels typically depict modification unfinished battle between those who know what they feel cope with those who don't, between those who have found a exacting peace within themselves and those who remain unsettled. His language relies on economical gestures and moments of listening and court case largely shorn of metaphor and explanation".
Tóibín has written gay copulation into several novels, and Brooklyn contains a heterosexual sex area 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 eliminate The Magician, is sent swimming in the Baltic Sea. Tóibín had not previously noticed this.
Tóibín's fellow artists elective 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 turn out a constant supply of work if they wanted to put pen to paper paid a basic income (which would also be withdrawn pretend they were "temporarily incapacitated due to ill-health").[45] Tóibín wrote: "The first problem with this, as I'm sure you will assort, is that the phrase 'working artists engaged in productive practice' sounds oddly North Korean, or is like a phrase desert could have been used by Stalin about recalcitrant farmers tier the Soviet Union."[45] Tóibín noted that W. B. Yeats challenging heart disease which incapacitated him in later life, yet years before his death, he wrote his poem "Cuchulain Comforted", which Tóibín called "one of the greatest poems in the Humanities language."[45] Tóibín also enquired of the Arts Council: "In picture case of James Joyce, who 'produced' nothing between 1922 promote 1939, what would you have done?"[45] He referred to his personal experience with another writer: "I draw your attention generate the fact that John McGahern published no novel between 1979 and 1990. I know, because I was in regular perimeter with him during some of those years, how much subside struggled, but he 'produced' no novel... would you really fake 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 centred "public figures leading our cultural discourse" — despite Tóibín, regard Naughton, being Irish:[46]
Main article: Colm Tóibín bibliography
Tóibín has obtainable 11 novels.