Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet. Tóibín was born on May 30, 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland, and studied at University College Dublin. From 1975–78, he lived in Barcelona and used the experience as inspiration for two books—the novel The South (Scribner, 1990), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times / Aer Lingus First Fiction Award, and the nonfiction work Homage to Barcelona (Simon & Schuster, 1990). He has published twenty-four works of fiction, nonfiction, and plays, including The Magician (Scribner, 2021); Brooklyn (Scribner, 2009), which was later adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film; and The Master (Scribner, 2004), which received the International Dublin Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award. In 2022, Tóibín published Vinegar Hill (Beacon Press), his first poetry collection. 

Tóibín has been short-listed three times for the Booker Prize and has won the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year, the Costa Novel of the Year, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Irish PEN Award for his contributions to Irish literature.

Tóibín is currently the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a vice president of the Royal Society of Literature.