In 2015, ahead of a referendum on marriage in Ireland, Tóibín delivered a talk titled "The Embrace of Love: Being Gay in Ireland Now" in Trinity Hall, featuring Roger Casement's diaries, the work of Oscar Wilde, John Broderick and Kate O'Brien, and Senator David Norris's 1980s High Court battles. He was appointed Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 2017. Publishing imprint Tóibín jointly runs the Dublin-based publishing imprint, Tuskar Rock Press, with his agent Peter Straus. Themes Tóibín's work explores a number of main themes: the depiction of Irish society, living in exile, the legacy of Catholicism, the process of creativity, and the preservation of a personal identity, masculinity, fatherhood and homosexual identity, and on personal identity when confronted by loss. The "Wexford" novels (The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship) use Enniscorthy, the town of Tóibín's birth, as narrative material, together with the history of Ireland and the death of his father. An autobiographical account and reflection on this episode can be found in the non-fiction book, The Sign of the Cross. In 2009, he published Brooklyn, a tale of a woman emigrating to Brooklyn from Enniscorthy; characters from that novel also appear in Nora Webster, in which the young character of Donal seems to have been part-based on Colm's own childhood. Two other novels, The Story of the Night and The Master, revolve around characters who have to deal with a homosexual identity and take place outside Ireland for the most part, with a character having to cope with living abroad. His first novel, The South, seems to have ingredients of both lines of work. It can be read together with The Heather Blazing as a diptych of Protestant and Catholic heritages in County Wexford, or it can be grouped with the "living abroad" novels. A third topic that links The South and The Heather Blazing is that of creation, of painting in the first case and of the careful wording of a judge's verdict in the second. This third thematic line culminated in The Master, a study on identity, preceded by a non-fiction book on the same subject, Love in a Dark Time. The book of short stories Mothers and Sons deals with family themes, both in Ireland and Catalonia, and homosexuality. As described by The New Yorker in 2021, his characters are "careful in conversation, each utterance fraught with importance... [his] novels typically depict an