About the Author

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah's Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster; as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and was named the 2022-2024 Laureate for Irish Fiction by the Arts Council of Ireland. He was shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize. He was also awarded the Bodley Medal, the Würth Prize for European Literature, and the Prix Femina spécial for his body of work.

Reviews

John Banville Irish Times Is it permissible even to speak, as so many do nowadays, of a "gay community"? Tóibín treats [this] and many other questions with confidence and authority, both of which attributes are only strengthened by the moderation of his tone and the depth of his compassion. He writes with rare tenderness of figures as disparate as Elizabeth Bishop and Francis Bacon, Thomas Mann and Roger Casement, Thom Gunn and Pedro Almodóvar.

John Gardner Times Literary Supplement It is Colm Tóibín's great strength that he is able to attune himself to nuances, and to the ways in which people "invent" themselves.

Mark Levin Men's Journal Tóibín is a superb technician with a brave soul.

Robert Sullivan Vogue Tóibín writes with high-voltage restraint; his sentences are masterfully devoid of trickery...He is tuned in to the silent language of families, the messages that are unspoken and slip past the rest of the world, landing deep into the hearts of those who understand.

Ruth Padel Financial Times Tóibín demonstrates wonderfully how a dedicated writer always thinks with other writers: their lives and sexuality, as well as their work. Tóibín can be engagingly mischievous and witty, but is deeply serious about books.

Departing from recent novels The Blackwater Lightship and The Story of the Night and nonfiction such as his Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border, Dublin-based writer Toibin offers nine case studies in as many chapters of how "gay life" has informed our readings of writers, artists and filmmakers like Oscar Wilde, Francis Bacon, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, Pedro Almodovar and Mark Doty. The chapter "Goodbye to Catholic Ireland" wonders if Cathal " Searchaigh is the first gay poet in the Irish language, and speaks against the Church's continued hold on the Irish life of the mind. (Oct. 29) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

John Banville Irish Times Is it permissible even to speak, as so many do nowadays, of a "gay community"? Toibin treats [this] and many other questions with confidence and authority, both of which attributes are only strengthened by the moderation of his tone and the depth of his compassion. He writes with rare tenderness of figures as disparate as Elizabeth Bishop and Francis Bacon, Thomas Mann and Roger Casement, Thom Gunn and Pedro Almodovar.