Colm Tóibín
Biography
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in 1955. His grandfather took part in the 1916 Easter Rising, for which he was interned. His father was a teacher. Tóibín was educated at University College, Dublin. The day after he graduated he left for Barcelona, where he spent three years. He worked as a teacher but was involved in local Catalan politics. He returned to Ireland to do a M.A. (on the poet, Anthony Hecht) but never completed it. He worked as a journalist and travelled in Latin America and Africa. His first novel, The South, was published in 1990, after having been turned down by most English publishers. He has continued to work as a journalist and critic and published novels as well as travel and criticism.
Links
His own website (but not kept up to date and many of the links don’t work)
Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín
Writers’ rooms: Colm Tóibín
The Writing Life: Colm Toibin
Interview
Interview
Interview
Interview
Interview
Bibliography
1987 Walking Along the Border (later: Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border)
1987 Martyrs and Metaphors
1990 The Trials of the Generals: Selected Journalism
1990 The South
1990 Homage to Barcelona
1990 Dubliners
1992 The Heather Blazing
1994 The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe
1996 The Story of the Night
1999 The Modern Library: The Two Hundred Best Novels in English Since 1950 (with Carmel Callil)
1999 The Blackwater Lightship
2002 Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives From Wilde to Almodovar
2002 Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush
2004 The Master
2006 Mothers and Sons
2006 The Use of Reason
2009 Brooklyn
2010 The Empty Family
2010 All a Novelist Needs (his essays on Henry James)
2012 New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their Families
2012 The Testament of Mary
2014 Nora Webster
2015 On Elizabeth Bishop
2017 House of Names
2021 The Magician
2022 Vinegar Hill (poetry)
2022 One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses
2023 A Guest at the Feast : Essays
2024 Long Island