Colm Toibin

Colm Tóibín is one of Ireland's most celebrated living writers — a novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, and journalist whose elegant, emotionally precise fiction has earned him international acclaim. Born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in 1955, he studied at University College Dublin and has lived in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and New York. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Tóibín's novels include The South, The Heather Blazing, The Blackwater Lightship, The Master, Brooklyn (winner of the Costa Novel Award, adapted into an Oscar-nominated film), Nora Webster, The Magician, and Long Island. A Guest at the Feast is a collection of his literary essays and criticism, displaying the same intelligence and emotional sensitivity that characterises his fiction. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. His audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers fiction and essays of extraordinary refinement — writing that finds drama in silence, that understands loss and longing, and that proves the quietest stories can be the most powerful.