Colm Tóibín is widely hailed as a giant of contemporary Irish literature. His new novel is The Magician (2021), about the life of major 20th century fiction writer and 1929 Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, author of Death in Venice (1912), and The Magic Mountain (1924).
The novel follows Mann from his provincial German childhood, and his struggles to conceal his artistic aspirations and homosexuality from his conservative family, through the upheavals of World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War.
Colm Toibin was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in 1955. He studied at University College Dublin and lived in Barcelona between 1975 and 1978. His 2009 novel Brooklyn was made into a feature film in 2015 by director John Crowley and a script written by Nick Hornby. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Tóibin last visited UAlbany in 2016 in association with a screening of BROOKLYN, based on his novel of the same name, and widely acclaimed as a Top 10 film of that year.
Lynne Tillman is the author of six novels, five collections of short stories, two collection of essays, and two other nonfiction books. A UAlbany English Professor and Writer-in-Residence, Tillman is a two-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for her essay collection, What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (2014), and for her novel, No Lease on Life (1998). Vulture named her 2006 novel, American Genius, A Comedy, “1 of the 100 Most Important Books of the 2000s... So Far.”
