Goucher College’s Kratz Center for Creative Writing is presenting Colm Tóibín—the award-winning Irish novelist and journalist—on Monday, November 12, at 8 p.m. in Kraushaar Auditorium. Tóibín will read from his works and sign copies of his books.
This event is free and open to the public, but tickets must be reserved at www.goucher.edu/tickets or by calling 410-337-6333. For more information, contact the Kratz Center at kratz@goucher.edu.
Additionally, there will be an opportunity to meet the author earlier that day at 3:30 p.m. in the Siebert Curriculum Resource Center of the Athenaeum. This event is also free and open to the public, and tickets are not necessary.
Tóibín, the Fall 2012 Kratz Center visiting author, was born in Enniscorthy, Ireland, in 1955. He studied at University College Dublin and lived in Barcelona between 1975 and 1978. Out of his experience in Barcelona he produced two books, Homage to Barcelona (1990) and The South (1990), which is set in Spain and rural Ireland in the 1950s and tells 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.
When Tóibín returned to Ireland in 1978 he worked as a journalist for In Dublin, Hiberni, and The Sunday Tribune, becoming features editor of In Dublin in 1981 and editor of Magill, Ireland’s current affairs magazine, in 1982. He left Magill in 1985 and traveled in Africa and South America. His journalism from the 1980s was collected in The Trial of the Generals (1990). His other work as a journalist and travel writer includes Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (1987) and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994).
In The Heather Blazing (1992), the central character is a judge in the Irish High Court who is 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, while The Blackwater Lightship (1999) describes the uneasy relationship between a grandmother, her daughter and granddaughter, who are brought together by a family tragedy. This book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The Master (2004) won and was shortlisted for several awards, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Brooklyn (2009) tells the story of Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York in the early 1950s; the novel won the Costa Novel of the Year.
Tóibín is editor of The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999). 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, which enabled him to research the life of Irish dramatist Lady Augusta Gregory for his book Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (2002). All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James, a collection of critical essays, was published in 2010.
His memoir A Guest at the Feast was published in 2011, and his new collection of essays New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers & Their Families came out this past June in the United States.
Tóibín is a regular contributor to The Dublin Review, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Ulster and University College Dublin. He has twice been the Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University and was a visiting writer at the University of Texas at Austin. He also taught at Princeton University between 2009 and 2011 and was professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester in Fall 2011. He is now the Mellon Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
Media Contact
Kristen Pinheiro
Media Relations Director
kristen.pinheiro@goucher.edu
410-337-6316