Colm Tóibín

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Template:Short description Template:About Template:Use Hiberno-English Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox officeholder Colm Tóibín (Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell,<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> {{#invoke:IPA|main}}; born 1955) 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 Template:Linktext 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 years

Tóibín was born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> He is the fourth of five children.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He was reared in Parnell Avenue.<ref name="receives honorary degree in Ulster"/> His parents were Bríd and Michael Tóibín.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He is one of the two youngest children in his family, alongside his brother Niall.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/><ref name=altar_boy />

His grandfather, Patrick Tobin, participated in the Easter Rising in April 1916, and was subsequently interned at Frongoch in Wales, while an uncle was involved in the IRB during the Irish Civil War.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> Following the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922, Tóibín's family favoured the Fianna Fáil political party.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/>

Tóibín grew up in a home where there was, he said, "a great deal of silence".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Unable to read until the age of nine, he also developed a stammer.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> When he was eight years of age, in 1963, his father became ill and his mother sent her two youngest sons 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 her two youngest sons while tending their father.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> Tóibín traces the stammer he developed to this time – a stammer which would often leave him unable to speak his own name, and which he retained throughout his life.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> Tóibín's father – who was a schoolteacher – died in 1967, when his son was twelve years of age.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/>

Tóibín received his secondary education at St Peter's College, Wexford, where he was a boarder between 1970 and 1972. He later spoke of finding some of the priests attractive.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He was also an altar boy in his youth.<ref name=altar_boy>Template:Cite news</ref>

Tóibín went to University College Dublin (UCD), first attending history and English lectures there in 1972,<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> before graduating with a BA in 1975. He thought about becoming a civil servant but decided against this.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> Instead, he left Ireland for Barcelona in 1975, later commenting: "I arrive the 24th of September 1975. Franco dies 20th November".<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> The city would later feature in some of Tóibín's early work: his first novel, 1990's The South, has two characters meeting in Barcelona.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> His 1990 non-fiction work Homage to Barcelona also references the city in its title.

Tóibín left Barcelona in 1978 and came back to Ireland.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> He began writing for In Dublin.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> Tóibín became editor of the monthly news magazine Magill<ref name="receives honorary degree in Ulster"/> in 1982, and remained in the position until 1985. He left due to a dispute with Vincent Browne, MagillTemplate:'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 popularity could survive the "kiss of death" of an endorsement by Conor Cruise O'Brien. The New Yorker telephoned Conor Cruise O'Brien to confirm that this was so, but Cruise O'Brien disagreed and the statement could not be corroborated.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Personal life

Tóibín is gay.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Since Template:C. 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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> He has served as a curator of exhibits for the Manhattan-based Morgan Library & Museum.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> He has judged both the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Giller Prize.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> 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.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/>

As of 2008, he had family in Enniscorthy, including two sisters (Barbara and Nuala) and a brother (Brendan).<ref name="receives honorary degree in Ulster"/>

Tóibín lived on Southside Dublin City's Upper Pembroke Street as of 2005, where on occasions his friends — such as playwright Tom Murphy and former Gate Theatre director Michael Colgan — assembled for social interaction and entertainment.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> 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.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> He filled this house with artwork and expensive furniture.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> He possesses a personal key to the private gated park at Dublin's Fitzwilliam Square, which is shut to ordinary members of the public.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/>

In 2019, Tóibín spoke about having survived testicular cancer, which spread to multiple organs, including a lung, liver, and lymph node.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> 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.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/>

Tóibin's non-fiction was influenced by Joan Didion and Norman Mailer.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> He said decades after the publication of his debut novel, The South, "If you look at it, you see that the sentence structure is more or less taken from Didion", and expressed reservations about its quality.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/>

In July 1972, aged 17, he had a summer job as a barman in the Grand Hotel in Tramore, County Waterford, working from six in the evening to two in the morning. He spent his days on the beach, reading The Essential Hemingway, the copy of which he still professes to have, its "pages stained with seawater". The book developed in him a fascination with Spain, led to a wish to visit that country, and gave him "an idea of prose as something glamorous, smart and shaped, and the idea of character in fiction as something oddly mysterious, worthy of sympathy and admiration, but also elusive. And more than anything, the sheer pleasure of the sentences and their rhythms, and the amount of emotion living in what was not said, what was between the words and the sentences."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Eavan Boland introduced him to the poetry of Louise Glück while Boland and Tóibín were at Stanford together in the 2000s.<ref name=kenyon/> Tóibín stated in 2017 that "there are a few books of mine that I have written since then that I don't think I could have written had it not been for that encounter".<ref name=kenyon/> When Glück was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, Tóibín immediately wrote an article in praise of her and had it published.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

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".<ref name=portrait_of_the_artist>Template:Cite news</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

He writes in great discomfort, saying 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."<ref name=kenyon/>

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 first hints, or sensations, of the tales as they form in James's thoughts is itself an instance of writer's wizardry".<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> In 2009, he published Brooklyn, which was made into a movie in 2015. Its protagonist is Eilis Lacey, who emigrates from Ireland to Brooklyn. In 2012 Tóibín published The Testament of Mary, and in 2014 he published Nora Webster, a portrait of a recently widowed mother of four in Wexford struggling through a period of grief.<ref name=portrait_of_the_artist/> A sequel to Brooklyn titled 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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Tóibín has written two short story collections. His first, Mothers and Sons, which — as the name suggests — explores the 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.<ref name="The Empty Family Stories">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> It was shortlisted for the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.<ref name="Frank O'Connor in line for major prize"/>

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 Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994). He has written for the London Review of Books, The New York 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".<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> His article 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). He wrote a collection of essays, Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar (2002), and a study on Lady Gregory, Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (2002). In his 2012 essay collection New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families he studies the biographies of James Baldwin, J. M. Synge, and W. B. Yeats, among others.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> In 2015, he released On Elizabeth Bishop, a critical study that made The GuardianTemplate:'s Best Books of 2015 list twice.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> In 2011, The Times Literary Supplement published his poem "Cush Gap, 2007".<ref name="Colm Toibin the poet">Template:Cite news</ref> The December 2021 issue of The New York Review of Books included his poem "Father & Son",<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

His personal notes and workbooks are deposited at the National Library of Ireland.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Lecturing

Tóibín has been a visiting professor at Stanford University,<ref name="receives honorary degree in Ulster"/> The University of Texas at Austin<ref name="receives honorary degree in Ulster"/> and Princeton University. He has also lectured at several other universities, including Middlebury College, Boston College,<ref name="receives honorary degree in Ulster"/> New York University,<ref name="receives honorary degree in Ulster"/> Loyola University Maryland, and The College of the Holy Cross. In 2017 he lectured in Athens, Georgia as the University of Georgia Chair for Global Understanding.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He was a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester, succeeding Martin Amis in that post,<ref name="Colm'sPENwins"/> and currently teaches at Columbia University.Template:Fact

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".<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/>

In 2015, ahead of a referendum on marriage in Ireland, Tóibín delivered a talk titled "The Embrace of Love: Being Gay in Ireland Now" in Trinity Hall, featuring Roger Casement's diaries, the work of Oscar Wilde, John Broderick, Kate O'Brien, and Senator David Norris's 1980s High Court battles.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

He was appointed Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 2017.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Publishing imprint

Tóibín founded the Dublin-based publishing imprint, Tuskar Rock Press, with his agent Peter Straus.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/> He set up the imprint especially so he could publish the then unknown Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who is a "friend" of Tóibin's who went on to win the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

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".<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/>

Tóibín has written gay sex into several novels, and Brooklyn contains a heterosexual sex scene in which the heroine loses her virginity.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

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.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head">Template:Cite magazine</ref> Tóibín had not previously noticed this.<ref name="Inside Mann's Head"/>

Awards and honours

Tóibín's fellow artists elected him to Aosdána, which is supported by the Arts Council.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Arts Council director Mary Cloake called Tóibín "a champion of minorities" as he collected the 2011 Irish PEN Award.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

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").<ref name="Arts Council = North Korea"/> Tóibín wrote: "The first problem with this, as I'm sure you will agree, is that the phrase 'working artists engaged in productive practice' sounds oddly North Korean, or is like a phrase that could have been used by Stalin about recalcitrant farmers in the Soviet Union."<ref name="Arts Council = North Korea"/> Tóibín noted that W. B. Yeats had heart disease which incapacitated him in later life, yet days before his death, he wrote his poem "Cuchulain Comforted", which Tóibín called "one of the greatest poems in the English language."<ref name="Arts Council = North Korea"/> Tóibín also enquired of the Arts Council: "In the case of James Joyce, who 'produced' nothing between 1922 and 1939, what would you have done?"<ref name="Arts Council = North Korea"/> He referred to his personal experience with another writer: "I draw your attention to the fact that John McGahern published no novel between 1979 and 1990. I know, because I was in regular touch with him during some of those years, how much he struggled, but he 'produced' no novel... would you really have sent 'auditors' down to Leitrim to do 'a sample audit' of what he was doing?"<ref name="Arts Council = North Korea">Template:Cite news</ref>

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:<ref>This loose list quickly became somewhat discredited on account of numerous flagrant inaccuracies and anomalous inclusions (it even included Alan Rusbridger, the then editor-in-chief of The ObserverTemplate:'s sister title), and a correction was printed the following Sunday, noting that several of those included "would not claim to be British" (most notably Seamus Heaney and Tóibín), correcting misspelt, and even incorrect, names - e.g. "Andrew (not Anthony)", "David (not Derek)" -, while one inclusion was discovered in the course of that week to have been dead since 1995. See: Template:Cite news</ref>

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Selected bibliography

{{#invoke:Labelled list hatnote|labelledList|Main article|Main articles|Main page|Main pages}} Tóibín has published 11 novels.

See also

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References

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Sources

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

Further reading

  • Allen Randolph, Jody. "Colm Tóibín, December 2009." Close to the Next Moment. Manchester: Carcanet, 2010.
  • Boland, Eavan. "Colm Tóibín." Irish Writers on Writing. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2007.
  • Costello-Sullivan, Kathleen. Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín. Reimagining Ireland series. Ed. Eamon Maher. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012.
  • Cronin, Michael G. 'Revolutionary Bodies: homoeroticism and the political imagination in Irish Writing'. Manchester University Press, 2022.
  • Delaney, Paul. Reading Colm Tóibín. Dublin: Liffey Press, 2008, Template:ISBN
  • Educational Media Solutions, 'Reading Ireland, Contemporary Irish Writers in the Context of Place', 2012, Films Media Group
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