Born May 30: Colm Tóibín

All this, and now he's a Tony nominee, too, for his debut, a one-woman show adapted into the novella, The Testament of Mary. Despite favorable reviews and several nominations, the Broadway show closed prematurely. If ticket sales were sluggish it may be because ticket prices were ridiculous. Early in its run, when I tried to order online two normal, non-premium orchestra seats on a week night, the total was $418. For a monologue. I didn't go. Anyway, here's hoping he wins on June 9 and that NPH kisses him.

Predicting future Nobel Prize honorees is a thankless, pointless pastime, yet everything the Nobel winners in literature have, Colm Tóibín has too: an impressive body of novels illuminating an overlooked group of people, many books of nonfiction, journalism, history, and travel (try Bad Blood: A Walk along the Irish Border or Homage to Barcelona), a staggering and seemingly effortless range of important critical essays, vision, verve, and gravitas (some of which are collected in All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families [Kindle], and Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature).

After being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Tóibín’s debut novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of the Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his revelatory novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros.

His sixth novel Brooklyn was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and won a Costa award. (No update on the film, adapted by Nick Hornby, which was to have begun shooting this spring with Rooney Mara, and didn't.) Tóibín's Lammy winner The Empty Family is flat-out magnificent, and some readers insist his previous story collection Mothers and Sons is even better. Amazon and Amazon UK list his Untitled Novel on Ireland as releasing in February or March 2014.

(photo by Joshua Bright via)

Comments

[Sandy]

Winner and still champion, this birthday boy. I'm hoping that 'The Testament of Mary' (play) will be snapped up by local theater companies seeking a high-quality work with potentially low production costs. Meanwhile, Scott Rudin can go twist on it.

[Tailor]

Always one of my favorites.

[macartney]

The Pakistani love story in Empty Family takes the cake, but story by story, Mothers and Sons will knock you out. They don't make storytellers like Toibin any more.