Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín ( , is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.

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 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 from 2017 to 2022. He subsequently became Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University in Manhattan, New York City.

Early life and education

Colm Tóibín was born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland. He was reared in Parnell Avenue. Unable to read until the age of nine, he also developed a stammer. When he was eight years of age, in 1963, his father became ill and his mother sent her two youngest sons, Colm and his brother Niall, 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 them while tending their father. He was also an altar boy in his youth.

Tóibín went to University College Dublin (UCD), first attending history and English lectures there in 1972,

Personal life

Tóibín is gay. Since 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. 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. 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.<!-- Tóibín sent a photograph of Borges to Don DeLillo, who described it as "the face of Borges against a dark background—Borges fierce, blind, his nostrils gaping, his skin stretched taut, his mouth amazingly vivid; his mouth looks painted; he's like a shaman painted for visions, and the whole face has a kind of steely rapture". DeLillo often seeks inspiration from it.

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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.

Influences

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. 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.

Eavan Boland introduced him to the poetry of Louise Glück while Boland and Tóibín were at Stanford together in the 2000s.

Writing

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". 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.

He described his approach to writing 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."

Tóibín has written two short story collections. His first, Mothers and 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. It was shortlisted for the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. In 2015, he released On Elizabeth Bishop, a critical study that made The Guardians Best Books of 2015 list twice. 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. 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.

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. The December 2021 issue of The New York Review of Books included his poem "Father & Son", 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.

In an article in The Guardian newspaper associated with the publication of his 2026 short story collection The News from Dublin Tóibín explains how he comes to write his fiction. He explains how in 2008 he started thinking of and writing a story about an Irishman long settled illegally in San Francisco in the US and planning to return to Ireland, knowing that he could never return, and would never see his adult daughter again. He set the unfinished story aside. When Donald Trump was elected as US president for the second time, stating his intention of deporting illegal immigrants, he took up the story again with the Irishman planning to leave on the day of Trump's inauguration, intentionally writing it, with the name Five Bridges, at the time of the inauguration.

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

Lecturing

Tóibín has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, He was a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester, succeeding Martin Amis in that post,

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".

He was appointed Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 2017.

Publishing imprint

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

Themes

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 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".

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. Tóibín had not previously noticed this.

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

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").

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.

1993: Encore Award for a second novel, The Heather Blazing
1999: Booker Prize shortlist, for The Blackwater Lightship
2004: Booker Prize shortlist, for The Master
2004: The New York Times, as one of the ten most notable books of the year, for The Master
2005: Stonewall Book Award, for The Master
2006: International Dublin Literary Award, for The Master
2008: Honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) from the University of Ulster, in recognition of his contribution to contemporary Irish literature
2009: Booker Prize longlist, for Brooklyn
2009: Costa Novel Award, for Brooklyn
2010: Awarded the 38th annual AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award
2011: Irish PEN Award, for contribution to Irish literature
2011: Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award shortlist, for The Empty Family.
2013: Booker Prize shortlist, for The Testament of Mary
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
2017: The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award
2017: Honorary doctorate from the Open University, for services to the arts and sciences
2017: The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement
2019: Premio Malaparte (Italy)
2019: Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award
2021: Notable Book, Critics' Top Book, and Top 10 Book of Historical Fiction by The New York Times, for The Magician
2021: David Cohen Prize for Literature
2022: Folio Prize, for The Magician
2024: Würth-Preis für Europäische Literatur
2025: International Dublin Literary Award, Longlisted for Long Island.
2025: Honorary Doctorate Oxford University

Selected bibliography

Tóibín has published 11 novels.

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References

Sources

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

External links

Colm Tóibín at Aosdána
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)