Colm Tóibín

Tóibín's father, a teacher, died when he was twelve, a loss and silence he has returned to across decades of fiction set partly in his native Enniscorthy, County Wexford: the same town that becomes Brooklyn's Eilis Lacey's point of departure. He left Ireland himself after university for Barcelona in the mid-1970s, working as a journalist during Spain's transition from dictatorship, before returning home to write fiction full-time.

He built his reputation on quiet, interior novels of reticence and withheld emotion, including The Master, an acclaimed imagining of Henry James's inner life, and Brooklyn, his most widely loved book, about a young Irishwoman torn between her old and new countries. He has written openly about growing up gay in a conservative Ireland, and continued producing ambitious literary biography-fiction, including The Magician, on Thomas Mann.