Colm Tóibín (, approximately ; 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, securing for Toíbín a bounty of thousands of euro as it is one of the richest literary awards in the world. 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 "UK and Ireland Nobel" David Cohen Prize in 2021. He succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. He was appointed Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 2017. He is now Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University in Manhattan. Early years Tóibín was born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland. He was reared in Parnell Avenue. His parents were Bríd and Michael Tóibín. He is one of the two youngest children in his family, alongside his brother Niall. 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 – sending her two youngest children to stay with an aunt in County Kildare – abandoned them for three months, so that she could escort their father to Dublin, where he could be cared for. 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 worked as a schoolteacher – died in 1967, when his son was twelve years of age. Tóibín received his