A former altar boy from County Wexford, Colm Tóibín is the celebrated author of seven novels and several acclaimed collections of stories and essays.

He has been short-listed twice for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, and his play The Testament of Mary was nominated for the Tony Award. A regular contributor to The Dublin Review, he describes the flowering of Irish literary talent and the renewed international interest in it.

On April 10, Tóibín spoke to an enthusiastic crowd at Elmhurst College about the Irish literary renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, led by literary patron and writer Lady Augusta Gregory and poet and playwright William Butler Yeats.

Colm Tóibín is an award-winning Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic and poet whose work has been published in more than 30 languages. He has twice been named the Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University and has also been a visiting writer at the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Currently the Mellon Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, he also has taught at both Princeton and the University of Manchester.

Some of Tóibín’s later journalism pieces were collected in The Trial of the Generals (1990). His collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons (2006), won the Edge Hill Prize. His plays have been performed at Dublin’s Peacock Theatre and the Dublin Theatre Festival, and his memoir A Guest at the Feast was published by Penguin UK as a Kindle original. Tóibín’s newest release, Nora Webster, is scheduled to be published in the UK in October 2014.