Colm Tóibín (b. 30 May 1955) is one of contemporary Ireland's most celebrated and versatile literary figures, widely acclaimed as a novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, and poet. Born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford — a location that serves as a vital anchor and setting for much of his fiction — he currently serves as the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He has been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize three times and was honored by the Arts Council of Ireland as the Laureate for Irish Fiction. He has also been a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester and was chancellor of the University of Liverpool from 2017 to 2022.
Among his landmark literary works are The Blackwater Lightship (1999); The Master (2004), a fictionalized study of the interior life of American author Henry James; Brooklyn (2009), considered his breakout commercial hit, it was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Saoirse Ronan; The Magician (2021) which reimagines the sweeping, complex life of German writer Thomas Mann; Long Island (2024), a sequel to Brooklyn; and The News from Dublin (2026), a collection of masterfully crafted short stories focusing on homecoming and distant lives.
Tóibín, who is gay, was a prominent voice during Ireland’s marriage equality referendum, speaking publicly about the importance of legal recognition for same-sex couples. Since 2012, he has been in a relationship with Hedi El Kholti, a publisher and editor of the literary press Semiotext. They share a home in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Although some of his works provide profound explorations of gay history and artistic lives — such as The Story of the Night (1996), Love in a Dark Time (2002), The Master (2004), and The Empty Family (2010) — Tóibín is not known specifically as a “gay” novelist. Commenting on the absence of homosexual students from his lectures, he has said: "Whatever aura I have, it's not as a gay guru — I'm not Edmund White. 'My mother's reading your book' — I get that a lot".