Colm Tóibín
| Colm Tóibín | |
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Colm Tóibín at the 2006 Texas Book Festival
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| Born |
30 May 1955 Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland |
| Occupation | Writer, Journalist |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | Irish |
| Education | B.A., (Hon) D.Litt. |
| Alma mater | University College Dublin (UCD) |
| Period | Late 20th century – Early 21st century |
| Genre | Essay, Novel, Short Story, Play, Poem |
| Subject | Irish society, living abroad, the process of creativity, the preservation of a personal identity |
| Notable works |
The Heather Blazing The Story of the Night The Blackwater Lightship The Master Brooklyn |
| Website | |
| www |
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Colm Tóibín (Irish pronunciation: [ˈkɔl̪ˠəmˠ t̪ˠoːˈbʲiːnʲ]; born 30 May 1955) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic and poet.
Tóibín is currently Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. He was appointed Chancellor of Liverpool University in 2017. Hailed as a champion of minorities as he collected the 2011 Irish PEN Award, that same year The Observer named him one of Britain's Top 300 Intellectuals (though he is Irish).
Tóibín was born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland. Tóibín's parents were Bríd and Michael Tóibín. He is the second youngest of five children. His grandfather, Patrick Tobin, was a member of the IRA, as was his grand-uncle Michael Tobin. Patrick Tobin took part in the 1916 Rebellion in Enniscorthy and was subsequently interned in Frongoch in Wales. Tóibín's father was a teacher who was involved in the Fianna Fáil party in Enniscorthy; he died when Colm was 12 years old.
Tóibín grew up in a home where there was, he said, "a great deal of silence." Unable to read until the age of nine, he was overcome by a stammer. He received his secondary education at St Peter's College, Wexford, where he was a boarder between 1970 and 1972. He later spoke of finding some of the priests attractive.
In July 1972, aged 17, he had a summer job as a barman in the Grand Hotel in Tramore, County Waterford, working from six in the evening to two in the morning. He spent his days on the beach, reading The Essential Hemingway, the copy of which he still professes to have, its "pages stained with seawater." The book developed in him a fascination with Spain, led to a wish to visit that country, and gave him "an idea of prose as something glamorous, smart and shaped, and the idea of character in fiction as something oddly mysterious, worthy of sympathy and admiration, but also elusive. And more than anything, the sheer pleasure of the sentences and their rhythms, and the amount of emotion living in what was not said, what was between the words and the sentences."
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