Colm Tóibín

Whether as a journalist, critic, essayist, academic or novelist, Colm Tóibín is non pareil. As editor of the groundbreaking Magill magazine for three years in the 1980s Tóibín established journalistic credentials that would, undoubtedly, have led to the very top of that profession. Instead he chose a different direction, with the publication in 1990 of The South, which he quickly followed up with The Heather Blazing (1992). His fifth novel The Master (2004), a fictional account of elements of the life of Henry James, gained a nomination for the Man Booker Prize and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2009 he won the Costa Award for his novel Brooklyn, later turned into a successful film. His most recent work House of Names (2017) is a retelling of the Greek tragedy of the house of Atreus (Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, Iphigenia and Electra). In his three decades as a novelist Tóibín has himself become The Master. There is, quite simply, no better writer in the English language. He talks to Myles Dungan.