Colm Tóibín
Shorlisted for the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
Photo © Steve Pyke
Reading Saturday, 17 September with Edna O'Brien @ 9PM
The Ballroom, Metropole Hotel, Cork
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in 1955. He studied at University College Dublin and lived in Barcelona between 1975 and 1978. Out of his experience in Barcelona be produced two books, the novel The South (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and winner of the Irish Times/ Aer Lingus First Fiction Award) and Homage to Barcelona, both published in 1990. When he returned to Ireland in 1978 he worked as a journalist for In Dublin, Hibernia and The Sunday Tribune, becoming features editor of In Dublin in 1981 and editor of Magill, Ireland’s current affairs magazine, in 1982. He is a regular contributor to the Dublin Review, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.
In 2006 he was appointed to the Arts Council in Ireland. He has twice been Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University and also been a visiting writer at the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently Leonard Milberg Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton University. Among his other novels are The Master and The Heather Blazing. He has published two short story collections, Mothers and Sons (2006, winner of the Edge Hill Prize) and The Empty Family (2010).
Author Links
Articles by and about Tóibín in the Guardian
Interview with Colm Tóibín at the Sydney Writers Festival (video)
