| What: |
|
Internationally acclaimed novelist and essayist Colm Tóibín will launch the 2007 Spring Visiting Writers and Poets Series at Trinity College. Born in County Wexford, southern Ireland, Tóibín’s seven published books range from groundbreaking literary criticism to the “luminous” novel The Master (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and his new collection of stories, Mothers and Sons.
“Tóibín’s beautiful and echoing collection . . . is a book to be offered to anyone who savors some of the most accomplished and nuanced soundings contemporary fiction has to offer. . . . Behind his impeccable sentences — and silences — something is always raging to get out.”
--Pico Iyer, front page, New York Times Book Review, Dec. 31, 2006 |
| Background: |
|
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in the southeast of Ireland in 1955. The day after he finished his finals in September 1975, he left for Barcelona and taught English there for three years. During his stay, he followed closely the political developments in Barcelona in these years, and marched in all the main demonstrations for Catalan autonomy and for Spanish democracy. Tóibín’s first novel The South, which captures some of his experiences and the Catalan landscape and culture, was finished in 1986 but not published until 1990, having been turned down in the meantime by most English publishers.
In the 1990s, Tóibín published two more novels, The Story of the Night and The Blackwater Lightship, a travel book The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe, and edited several anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction. In 1994, he began to write for The London Review of Books and has since been a regular contributor. His Love In a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar is made up mainly of pieces from The London Review of Books.
In 2000, he became a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at New York Public Library, working mainly on the Lady Gregory papers there. This resulted in Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush, a section of which appeared in The New York Review of Books in August 2001. He has given workshops and master classes at Listowel Writers Week, The Arvon Foundation, and The American University at Washington DC. He has also taught at the MFA program at the New School in Manhattan.
His new novel, The Master, stems from his nonfiction work, Love in a Dark Time, examining and fictionalizing the life of Henry James.
Sponsored by the Trinity College Department of English
This is event is free and open to the public, and a reception and book signing will follow the reading. For more information, please call (860) 297-2455.
|