科尔姆·托宾

科尔姆·托宾（爱尔兰语：Colm Tóibín，爱尔兰语发音：[ˈkɔl̪ˠəmˠ t̪ˠoːˈbʲiːnʲ] KAW-ləm toe-BEAN，1955年5月30日—）是一位爱尔兰小说家，散文家，剧作家，记者，评论家，诗人。

生平

托宾生于爱尔兰东南部韦克斯福德郡恩尼斯克西（Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford）一个积极投身爱尔兰独立运动的家庭，毕业于都柏林大学，主修历史和英文。1975-1978年在西班牙巴塞罗那居住。

自1990年发表处女作小说《南方》以来，托宾已出版6部长篇小说、1部中篇小说，2部短篇小说集、2部戏剧和多部游记、散文集。其中，《黑水灯塔船》、《大师》先后入围布克奖决选名单，后者荣获国际IMPAC都柏林文学奖（2006）。《布鲁克林》获2009年度英国科斯塔最佳小说奖。

托宾的作品主要描写爱尔兰社会、移居他乡者的生活、个人身份与性取向的探索与坚持等。他文笔优雅恬淡，内敛含蓄，被誉为“英语文学中的语言大师”。托宾先后在斯坦福大学、德克萨斯大学、普林斯顿大学教授写作。2011年9月，他接替马丁·艾米斯，担任曼彻斯特大学创意写作教授。2011年，英国《观察家报》将其选入“英国最重要的三百位知识分子”。

目前，托宾担任哥伦比亚大学英文与比较文学系梅隆讲席教授。

Colm Tóibín ( KUL-əm toh-BEEN, Irish: [ˈkɔl̪ˠəmˠ t̪ˠoːˈbʲiːnʲ]; born 30 May 1955) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.

His first novel, The South, was published in 1990. The Blackwater Lightship was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Master (a fictionalised version of the inner life of Henry James) was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 2006 International Dublin Literary Award. Nora Webster won the Hawthornden Prize, whilst The Magician (a fictionalised version of the life of Thomas Mann) won the Folio Prize. His fellow artists elected him to Aosdána, and he won the biennial David Cohen Prize in 2021.

He succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. He was chancellor of the University of Liverpool from 2017 to 2022. He subsequently became Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University in Manhattan, New York City.

Early life and education

Colm Tóibín was born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland. He is the fourth of five children. He was brought up on Parnell Avenue. by his parents, Bríd and Michael Tóibín.

His grandfather, Patrick Tobin, participated in the Easter Rising in April 1916, and was subsequently interned at Frongoch in Wales, while an uncle was involved in the IRB during the Irish Civil War. Following the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922, Tóibín's family favoured the Fianna Fáil political party.

Tóibín grew up in a home where there was, he said, "a great deal of silence". Unable to read until the age of nine, he also developed a stammer. When he was eight years of age, in 1963, his father became ill and his mother sent her two youngest sons, Colm and his brother Niall, to stay with an aunt in County Kildare for three months so that she could take their father to Dublin for medical care; she did not call or write to them while tending their father. Tóibín traces the stammer he developed to this time – a stammer which would often leave him unable to speak his own name, and which he retained throughout his life. Tóibín's father – who was a schoolteacher – died in 1967, when his son was twelve years of age.

Tóibín received his secondary education at St Peter's College, Wexford, where he was a boarder between 1970 and 1972. He later spoke of finding some of the priests attractive. He was also an altar boy in his youth.

Tóibín went to University College Dublin (UCD), first attending history and English lectures there in 1972, before graduating with a BA in 1975. He thought about becoming a civil servant but decided against this.

Early career

Instead, he left Ireland for Barcelona in September 1975. The city would later feature in some of Tóibín's early work: his first novel, 1990's The South, has two characters meeting in Barcelona. His non-fiction work Homage to Barcelona was published in 1990.

Tóibín left Barcelona in 1978 and came back to Ireland. He began writing for In Dublin. He became editor of the monthly news magazine Magill in 1982, and remained in the position until 1985. He left due to a dispute with Vincent Browne, Magill's managing director. In 1997, when The New Yorker asked Tóibín to write about Seamus Heaney becoming President of Ireland, Tóibín noted that Heaney's popularity could survive the "kiss of death" of an endorsement by Conor Cruise O'Brien. The New Yorker's fact checker telephoned Conor Cruise O'Brien to confirm that his endorsement would normally have that effect, but O'Brien said it would not, so the statement was not published.