Colm Tóibín Audiobooks

New fiction from a twice Booker-shortlisted Irish master: The News from Dublin

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Who is Colm Tóibín?

Colm Tóibín, born in 1955, is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet – a job description that would look like showing off if the record did not back every word of it. Since his debut novel The South in 1990, he has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice, for The Blackwater Lightship and for The Master, his fictionalised journey into the inner life of Henry James; The Master went on to win the International Dublin Literary Award in 2006, one of the richest literary prizes in the world. Nora Webster took the Hawthornden Prize, The Magician – his novel of Thomas Mann – won the Folio Prize, and in 2021 came the David Cohen Prize. His fellow artists elected him to Aosdána.

The academic honours are hardly less imposing: professor of creative writing at Manchester, chancellor of the University of Liverpool from 2017 to 2022, and now a humanities professorship at Columbia University in New York.

Colm Tóibín in audiobooks

Tóibín features in our catalogue with The News from Dublin, a title that signals home ground for one of Ireland’s most garlanded living writers. His great gift, visible in the books that made his name, is inhabiting inner lives – he has imagined his way into Henry James and Thomas Mann, no less – and that interiority is precisely what audio serves best: a voice in your ear, attending to feeling as much as event.

For UK listeners, this is literary fiction that asks for a little patience and repays it with interest. Writers do not accumulate a prize record like Tóibín’s by accident, and headphones are as good a place as any to find out why.