Acclaimed novelist, Colm Tóibín, will discuss his life as not only a writer and scholar but also an immigrant, and how that contributes to the themes of his work which deal with alienation, loss, suffering and injustice.
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford. He graduated from University College Dublin and moved to Barcelona where he taught English for three years before returning to Ireland. He worked as a journalist, columnist and editor for several Irish papers and magazines, with regular columns in papers like the Dublin Sunday Independent. In 1987, he published Walking Along the Border, an account of a journey by foot along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the first of many traveloques he would publish between novels. His first novel, The South, was published in 1990.
Colm Tóibín is the author of several novels including The Master, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction; Brooklyn, which won the Costa Fiction Award; and The Testament of Mary; as well as Mothers and Sons, a book of short stories. He has given workshops and master classes at The American University at Washington, D.C., and has also taught at the New School, Princeton University, Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books.