unfinished battle between those who know what they feel and those who don't, between those who have found a taut peace within themselves and those who remain unsettled. His prose relies on economical gestures and moments of listening, and is largely shorn of metaphor and explanation". Tóibín has written gay sex into several novels, and Brooklyn contains a heterosexual sex scene in which the heroine loses her virginity. Bernard Schwartz informed Tóibin after The Magician was published that eight of his novels feature "someone tak[ing] a swim in cold water and hesitat[ing] before they go in" – Thomas Mann, the protagonist in The Magician, is sent swimming in the Baltic Sea. Tóibín had not previously noticed this. Awards and honours Tóibín's fellow artists elected him to Aosdána, which is supported by the Arts Council. Arts Council director Mary Cloake called Tóibín "a champion of minorities" as he collected the 2011 Irish PEN Award. In 2017, Tóibin objected to the wording of an Arts Council letter, which was attempting to regulate artists and force them to produce a constant supply of work if they wanted to be paid a basic income (which would also be withdrawn if they were "temporarily incapacitated due to ill-health"). Tóibín wrote: "The first problem with this, as I'm sure you will agree, is that the phrase 'working artists engaged in productive practice' sounds oddly North Korean, or is like a phrase that could have been used by Stalin about recalcitrant farmers in the Soviet Union." Tóibín noted that W. B. Yeats had heart disease which incapacitated him in later life, yet days before his death, he wrote his poem "Cuchulain Comforted", which Tóibín called "one of the greatest poems in the English language." Tóibín also enquired of the Arts Council: "In the case of James Joyce, who 'produced' nothing between 1922 and 1939, what would you have done?" He referred to his personal experience with another writer: "I draw your attention to the fact that John McGahern published no novel between 1979 and 1990. I know, because I was in regular touch with him during some of those years, how much he struggled, but he 'produced' no novel... would you really have sent 'auditors' down to Leitrim to do 'a sample audit' of what he was doing?" In 2011, John Naughton, of The Observer, included Tóibín in his list of Britain's three hundred "public figures leading