Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, and critic born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford in 1955. He studied at University College Dublin and worked as a journalist in Barcelona before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), The Story of the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999), The Master (2004), Brooklyn (2009), Nora Webster (2014), and House of Names (2017). The Magician (2021, Viking) imagines the inner life of Thomas Mann from his childhood in Lübeck through the rise of the Nazis, exile in America, and final return to Europe, focusing on his suppressed homosexuality and the relationship between his life and art. It won the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2022. Brooklyn was adapted into a highly successful film in 2015. Tóibín is one of Ireland's most celebrated novelists, known for his quiet, luminous prose and his psychological precision. He has won the Encore Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and numerous other prizes, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times.