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Irish author Colm Tóibín is famous for literary works about Irish society, creativity and homosexuality. His most popular novels include The Blackwater Lightship and The Master.
Synopsis
Irish writer Colm Tóibín, born in 1955, worked as a journalist before achieving fame as a fiction writer. His works often depict Irish society and explore themes of creativity and homosexuality. His most famous novels include The Blackwater Lightship and The Master.
Profile
Born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland. The second youngest of five children, Colm Tóibín graduated from University College in Dublin in 1975. He then headed to Barcelona, the city that later inspired his first novel, The South, and the non-fiction work Homage to Barcelona, both published in 1990. During the 1980s, he worked as a journalist, first in Ireland and then in Argentina, the Sudan and Egypt.
Colm Tóibín's works often depict Irish society. He is the author of several works of fiction, including The Heather Blazing (1992), The Story of the Night(1996) and The Blackwater Lightship (1999), which was on the short list for the Booker Prize. The New York Times named his 2004 novel, The Master, one of the 10 most notable books of the year.
Colm Tóibín published his first collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons, in 2006. Non-fiction books include Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border(1994) and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994). He continues to work as a novelist, journalist, literary critic and university lecturer.
Retrieved from: http://www.biography.com/people/colm-t%C3%B3ib%C3%ADn-215184
It is Ireland in the early 1990s. Helen, her mother, Lily, and her grandmother, Dora have come together to tend to Helen's brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. With Declan's two friends, the six of them are forced to plumb the shoals of their own histories and to come to terms with each other.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Blackwater Lightship is a deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn an untimely death. In spare, luminous prose, Colm Tóibín explores the nature of love and the complex emotions inside a family at war with itself.
Retrieved from:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43702.The_Blackwater_Lightship