Colm TóibínColm Tóibín
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Biography
Irish novelist and journalist Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in Ireland in 1955 and was educated at University College Dublin where he read History and English. After graduating, he lived and taught in Barcelona, a city that he later wrote about in Homage to Barcelona (1990). He returned to Ireland and worked as a journalist before travelling through South America and Argentina. He is the author of a number of works of fiction and non-fiction and is a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines. He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 1995 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a member of Aosdána, an Irish organisation founded to promote the arts.
His first novel, The South (1990), set in Spain and rural Ireland in the 1950s, is the story of an Irish woman who leaves her husband and starts a relationship with a Spanish painter. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for First Book. Eamon Redmond, the central character in The Heather Blazing (1992), is a judge in the Irish High Court, haunted by his own past and the history of modern Ireland. The book won the Encore Award for the best second novel of the year. His third novel, The Story of the Night (1996), is set in Argentina during the Falklands War.
His novel, The Blackwater Lightship (1999), describes the uneasy relationship between a grandmother, her daughter and granddaughter, brought together by a family tragedy. The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
His non-fiction includes The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994) and The Irish Famine (1999) (with Diarmaid Ferriter). He is editor of The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999). His new book, Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar (2002), consists of a number of essays some of which had previously been published in the London Review of Books. In 2002 he became a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at New York Public Library, enabling him to research the life of Irish dramatist Lady Augusta Gregory for his book Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (2002). His latest novel, The Master (2004), is a portrait of the novelist Henry James. It was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and in 2006, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Colm Tóibín lives in Ireland. Mothers and Sons (2006), is a collection of short stories. His latest novel is Brooklyn (2009), winner of the 2009 Costa Novel Award.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Fiction, Non-fiction, Travel
Bibliography
Seeing is Believing: Moving Statues in Ireland (editor) Pilgrim Press, 1985
Martyrs and Metaphors Raven Arts Press, 1987
Walking Along the Border (re-issued as "Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border", Vintage, 1994) Queen Anne Press, 1987
Dubliners (with photographs by Tony O'Shea) Macdonald, 1990
Homage to Barcelona Simon & Schuster, 1990
The South Serpent's Tail, 1990
The Trial of the Generals: Selected Journalism 1980-1990 Raven Arts Press, 1990
The Heather Blazing Picador, 1992
The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe Cape, 1994
The Guinness Book of Ireland (editor with Bernard Loughlin) Guinness Publishing, 1995
The Kilfenora Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan (editor) New Island Books (Dublin), 1996
The Story of the Night Picador, 1996
Finbar's Hotel (contributor) Picador, 1997
Soho Square VI: New Writing From Ireland (editor) Bloomsbury, 1997
The Blackwater Lightship Picador, 1999
The Irish Famine (with Diarmaid Ferriter) Profile Books, 1999
The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950 (editor with Carmen Callil) Picador, 1999
The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (editor) Viking, 1999
The Irish Times Book of Favourite Irish Poems (editor) Irish Times Books, 2000
Lady Gregory's Toothbrush Lilliput Press (Dublin), 2002
Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar Picador, 2002
New Writing 11 (co-editor with Andrew O'Hagan) Picador, 2002
The Master Picador, 2004
Mothers and Sons Picador, 2006
Brooklyn Viking, 2009
Prizes and awards
1990 Whitbread First Novel Award (shortlist) The South
1991 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for First Book The South
1992 Encore Award The Heather Blazing
1994 Waterstone's/Volvo/Esquire Non-Fiction Book Award (shortlist) The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe
1995 E. M. Forster Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters)
1998 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction The Story of the Night
1999 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) The Blackwater Lightship
2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (shortlist) The Blackwater Lightship
2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) The Master
2005 British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award (shortlist) The Master
2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) The Master
2005 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France) The Master
2005 WH Smith Literary Award (shortlist) The Master
2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award The Master
2009 Costa Novel Award Brooklyn
Critical Perspective
Colm Tóibín's novels tend to be stories of Irish people of recent generations, in their native Ireland and abroad. Indeed, they are abroad more often than not, but all have strong connections home, through their families, their (sometimes ambivalent) longings to return to the homeland and so on. The Ireland Tóibín writes about is always geographically the same place. He himself was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford - and his birthplace is that same place to which his characters all seem tied. As an Irishman he has done much to promote his national literature, most recently editing the magnificent The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction, though he left himself out of it, presumably out of an admirable but quite misplaced modesty. He has also contributed to collections of Irish writing, perhaps most interestingly to Finbar's Hotel (1997), a collection of unsigned stories by seven Irish writers, which link to form a sort of collaborative novel.
Besides promoting Ireland's contemporary literature, Tóibín has not been wary of dealing with the delicate matters of his country's recent political past. His non-fiction work Bad Blood is an account of a walk he took along the Irish border in the summer of 1986 and the lives he found there, ordinary lives touched by their harsh political context and years of instability and hardship.
But the Troubles are never at the forefront of his excellent novels; rather they are stories of personal troubles (troubles, not Troubles), of loss and bereavement, of people trying valiantly to fit in to hostile societies. Blackwater Lightship (1999) is the story of a young man, Declan, dying of AIDS and his attempts to reconcile himself to his family, a family which find it hard enough to get along at the best of times. Probably Tóibín's best novel (and short-listed for the Booker Prize 1999), it is entirely unsentimental, but deeply moving. The writing is exquisitely beautiful, and moves the narrative towards an ending which manages to avoid the easy solutions or cheap sentiment one would expect of a lesser writer, and which is nonetheless perfectly satisfying and appropriate. Blackwater Lightship is one of the most perfect novels of loss and the painful inevitability of change of recent years.
Tóibín's first novel, The South (1990), is set mostly in Spain, in and near Barcelona, a city he's lived in and also written about in his elegiac travel-book Homage to Barcelona (1990). South shows us a relationship developing, before Tóibín brutally tears one of the characters away, leaving the other trying to rebuild her life without him. Most striking in this beautiful study of loss is the portrayal of the artist Katherine, passionate and resilient. Many of the characters in this book are artists, and Tóibín uses their Art to convey much more than just their states of mind at the time of painting - he uses it, in other words, for his own purposes and not just reflecting theirs. And as in so much of his work, Katherine's relationship with Ireland (and with her son and his family who still live there) gives us insights not only into our protagonist's nature but also by extension into that difficult Irish world into which she was born.
The Story of the Night (1996) is set in Argentina, where again Tóibín travelled in the 1980s, witnessing the trial of General Galtieri (which he wrote about in his collection of journalistic pieces, The Trial of the Generals (1990)). In The Story of the Night the Argentinean-born narrator's parents had come over from England (for once not Ireland) some time before his birth, but he himself still identifies with the homeland, and his mother (with whom he lives) stubbornly maintains a fierce old-fashioned nostalgia. As she aged she 'plastered the apartment with tourist posters of Buckingham Palace and the changing of the guard and magazine photographs of the royal family; her accent became posher and her face took on the guise of an elderly duchess who had suffered a long exile'.
Like Blackwater Lightship, this book deals with attitudes to homosexuality and Richard's attempts to find compromise in a society which will not allow him to live as openly as he could were he back in the motherland. Ironically, he's determined that his own mother - the proud Englishwoman - should never find out his secret; but this is to tell us more about her, a fascinating woman in a long line of inadequately-loving Tóibín mothers, than about the society she has left back home.
With the exception of The Story of the Night, all these travelling novels, moving from place to place, are rooted in the same little part of Ireland. The Heather Blazing (1992) brings together lots of little pieces of this place, the same pieces we have found scattered across the other books. People here read the Enniscorthy Echo (an appropriate name), characters walk along the beach to the edge of the corroded cliff where the Keatings' house is perched precariously (as we will see again in Blackwater Lightship), the scene is lit intermittently by the glare of the Tuskar lighthouse, and so on. And it is a beautiful, enticing place; so after a couple of books it feels wonderfully familiar to the reader too, and we too begin to feel nostalgia and yearning for it, for the old lighthouses, the bays and the eroded, marly cliffs, the days when we used to picnic on the strands. But the descriptions of these places (Enniscorthy and around) are surprisingly unsentimental, as indeed is the rest of the writing. Tóibín's portrayal of these places which his characters so often yearn for is admirably fair; he does not shirk from showing their problems as well as their magic - we are left in no doubt as to why everybody left in the first place (Katherine's mother in The South and the burning down of the family house, for instance).
The Heather Blazing's Eamon is a very strong character, as is Katherine in South - strong in themselves, and strongly and clearly drawn - and they couldn't be more different. It is the great integrity of the characters that helps hold these books together. Blackwater Lightship is something of a leap after these, something of a revelation, as Tóibín has lost his total reliance on his central figure. This is not to say that his characters are any less well drawn - quite the contrary, it is remarkable just how many of the characters are fully realised - but as in a great ensemble piece our attention is maintained regardless of which characters are prominent and which in the shadows. And though the writing of the earlier books did show great promise and great skill, it is really Blackwater Lightship, which appears the most utterly effortless, and delivers writing of the utmost power.
Daniel Hahn, 2002
Further reading on this site
Oxford Conference on the Teaching of Literature
The Oxford Conference investigates what it means to teach an increasingly international English language and literature, and also considers the contribution that literature can make to intercultural awareness. It takes... more... (16/12/2003)
Contact information
Publisher (General enquiries)
Picador
Pan Macmillan Ltd
20 New Wharf Road
London N1 9RR
England
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7014 6000
Fax: +44 (0)20 7014 6001
http://www.panmacmillan.com
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Agent
Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd
20 Powis Mews
London W11 1JN
England
Tel: +44 (0)20 7221 3717
Fax: +44 (0)20 7229 9084
http://www.rcwlitagency.co.uk
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Related links
http:/ / www.colmtoibin.com
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