Background
Colum McCann was born on February 28, 1965, in Dublin, Ireland.
2010
Colum McCann with Tina Brown, Orhan Pamuk, and Lawrence Schiller attend the Norman Mailer Center 2nd Annual Benefit Gala at Cipriani on October 19, 2010. Photo by Stephen Lovekin.
2011
Colum McCann with International Dublin Literary Award which he received in 2011.
2013
Colum McCann in 2013.
2015
Colum McCann with Arieh Ress at the New York Public Library in December 2015.
2017
Colum McCann at PEN America World Voices Festival in 2017.
2017
211 W San Francisco St, Santa Fe, NM 87501, United States
Colum McCann at the Lannan Foundation's Pursuit of Cultural Freedom series live in the Lensic Performing Arts Center on March 8, 2017.
Clonkeen Rd, Deansgrange, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland
Clonkeen College where Colum McCann studied.
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, United States
The University of Texas at Austin where Colum McCann studied.
Colum McCann
Colum McCann
Colum McCann
Colum McCann
Colum McCann
Colum McCann
Colum McCann
Colum McCann
Colum McCann. Photo by Patrick McMullan.
Colum McCann with J.J. Abrams and Trina Vargo.
Colum McCann
Colum McCann with National Book Award which he received in 2009.
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres which Colum McCann received in 2009.
(There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from...)
There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the Irishwoman who journeys through America in search of silence and solitude. But what is found in these stories, and discovered by these characters, is the astonishing poetry and peace found in the mundane: a memory, a scent on the wind, the grace in the curve of a street. Fishing the Sloe-Black River is a work of pure augury, of the channeling and re-spoken lives of people exposed to the beauty of the everyday.
https://www.amazon.com/Fishing-Sloe-Black-River-Colum-McCann/dp/0312423381/ref=sr_1_10?keywords=colum+mccann&qid=1580110780&sr=8-10
1994
(Colum McCann creates in Songdogs a mesmerizing evocation ...)
Colum McCann creates in Songdogs a mesmerizing evocation of the gulf between memory and imagination, love and loss, past and present. With unreliable memories and scraps of photographs as his only clues, Conor Lyons follows in the tracks of his father, a rootless photographer, as he moved from war-torn Spain to the barren plains of Mexico, where he met and married Conor's mother, to the American West, and finally back to Ireland, where the marriage and the story reach their heartrending climax. The narratives of Conor's quest and his parents' lives twine and untwine to astonishing effect.
https://www.amazon.com/Songdogs-Novel-Colum-McCann-ebook/dp/B00D6KLZJQ/ref=sr_1_14?keywords=colum+mccann&qid=1580110780&sr=8-14
1995
(In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves h...)
In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves his native Georgia for New York City and the most dangerous job in America. A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Above ground, the sandhogs - black, white, Irish, Italian - keep their distance from each other until a spectacular accident welds a bond between Walker and his fellow diggers - a bond that will bless and curse the next three generations. Years later, Treefrog, a homeless man driven below by a shameful secret, endures a punishing winter in his subway nest. In tones ranging from bleak to disturbingly funny, Treefrog recounts his strategies of survival - killing rats, scavenging for discarded soda cans, washing in the snow. Between Nathan Walker and Treefrog stretch seventy years of ill-fated loves and unintended crimes.
https://www.amazon.com/This-Side-Brightness-Colum-McCann-ebook/dp/B00D6KO8H2/ref=sr_1_7?keywords=colum+mccann&qid=1580110780&sr=8-7
1998
(Everything in This Country Must turns to the troubles in ...)
Everything in This Country Must turns to the troubles in Northern Ireland and reveals the reverberations of political tragedy in the most intimate lives of men and women, parents and children. In the title story, a teenage girl must choose between allegiance to her Catholic father and gratitude to the British soldiers who have saved the family's horse. The young hero of Hunger Strike, a novella, tries to replicate the experience of his uncle, an IRA prisoner on a hunger strike. And in Wood, a small boy does his part for the Protestant marches, concealing his involvement from his blind father.
https://www.amazon.com/Everything-This-Country-Must-Novella/dp/0312273185/ref=sr_1_11?keywords=colum+mccann&qid=1580110780&sr=8-11
2000
(A Russian peasant who became an international legend, a C...)
A Russian peasant who became an international legend, a Cold War exile who inspired millions, an artist whose name stood for genius, sex, and excess-the magnificence of Rudolf Nureyev's life and work are known, but now Colum McCann, in his most daring novel yet, reinvents this erotically charged figure through the light he cast on those who knew him. Taking his inspiration from the biographical facts, McCann tells the story through a chorus of voices: there is Anna Vasileva, Rudi's first ballet teacher, who rescues her protégé from the stunted life of his town; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet-sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan hustler, who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of Stalingrad to the wild abandon of New York in the eighties, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, Margot Fonteyn and John Lennon. And at the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.
https://www.amazon.com/Dancer-Novel-Picador-Modern-Classics-ebook/dp/B00D6KEING/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=colum+mccann&qid=1580110655&sr=8-6
2003
(A unique love story, a tale of loss, a parable of Europe,...)
A unique love story, a tale of loss, a parable of Europe, this haunting novel is an examination of intimacy and betrayal in a community rarely captured so vibrantly in contemporary literature. Zoli Novotna, a young woman raised in the traveling Gypsy tradition, is a poet by accident as much as by desire. As 1930s fascism spreads over Czechoslovakia, Zoli and her grandfather flee to join a clan of fellow Romani harpists. Sharpened by the world of books, which is often frowned upon in the Romani tradition, Zoli becomes the poster girl for a brave new world. As she shapes the ancient songs to her times, she finds her gift embraced by the Gypsy people and savored by a young English expatriate, Stephen Swann. But Zoli soon finds that when she falls she cannot fall halfway - neither in love nor in politics. While Zoli’s fame and poetic skills deepen, the ruling Communists begin to use her for their own favor. Cast out from her family, Zoli abandons her past to journey to the West, in a novel that spans the 20th century and travels the breadth of Europe.
https://www.amazon.com/Zoli-Novel-Colum-McCann-ebook/dp/B0015DYIZE/ref=sr_1_7?crid=2YV6HK23SH752&keywords=colum+mccann&qid=1579781662&sprefix=colum+mccann%2Caps%2C-1&sr=8-7
2006
(In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people...)
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter-mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence.
https://www.amazon.com/Let-Great-World-Spin-Novel/dp/0812973992/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2YV6HK23SH752&keywords=colum+mccann&qid=1579781662&sprefix=colum+mccann%2Caps%2C-1&sr=8-2
2009
(The novel TransAtlantic spans continents, leaps centuries...)
The novel TransAtlantic spans continents, leaps centuries, and unites a cast of deftly rendered characters, both real and imagined. Newfoundland, 1919. Two aviators set course for Ireland as they attempt the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, placing their trust in a modified bomber to heal the wounds of the Great War. Dublin, 1845 and ’46. On an international lecture tour in support of his subversive autobiography, Frederick Douglass finds the Irish people sympathetic to the abolitionist cause - despite the fact that as famine ravages the countryside, the poor suffer from hardships that are astonishing even to an American slave. New York, 1998. Leaving behind a young wife and newborn child, Senator George Mitchell departs for Belfast, where it has fallen to him, the son of an Irish-American father and a Lebanese mother, to shepherd Northern Ireland’s notoriously bitter and volatile peace talks to an uncertain conclusion. These three iconic crossings are connected by a series of remarkable women whose personal stories are caught up in the swells of history.
https://www.amazon.com/TransAtlantic-Novel-Colum-McCann/dp/0812981928/ref=sr_1_4?crid=2YV6HK23SH752&keywords=colum+mccann&qid=1579781662&sprefix=colum+mccann%2Caps%2C-1&sr=8-4
2013
(In Thirteen Ways of Looking, McCann charts the territory ...)
In Thirteen Ways of Looking, McCann charts the territory of chance and the profound and intimate consequences of even our smallest moments. Deeply personal, subtly subversive, at times harrowing, and indeed funny, yet also full of comfort, Thirteen Ways of Looking is a striking achievement. With unsurpassed empathy for his characters and their inner lives, Colum McCann forges from their stories a profound tribute to our search for meaning and grace. The collection is a rumination on the power of storytelling in a world where language and memory can sometimes falter, but in the end do not fail us, and a contemplation of the healing power of literature.
https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Ways-Looking-Colum-McCann-ebook/dp/B00TNDOYGQ/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2YV6HK23SH752&keywords=colum+mccann&qid=1579781662&sprefix=colum+mccann%2Caps%2C-1&sr=8-3
2015
(Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophic...)
Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice is a lesson in how to be a writer - and so much more than that. Intriguing and inspirational, this book is a call to look outward rather than inward. McCann asks his readers to constantly push the boundaries of experience, to see empathy and wonder in the stories we craft and hear. A paean to the power of language, both by argument and by example, Letters to a Young Writer is fierce and honest in its testament to the bruises delivered by writing as both a profession and a calling. It charges aspiring writers to learn the rules and even break them. These fifty-two essays are ultimately a profound challenge to a new generation to bring truth and light to a dark world through their art.
https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Young-Writer-Practical-Philosophical/dp/0399590803/ref=sr_1_5?crid=2YV6HK23SH752&keywords=colum+mccann&qid=1579781662&sprefix=colum+mccann%2Caps%2C-1&sr=8-5
2017
(Colum McCann’s most ambitious work to date, Apeirogon - n...)
Colum McCann’s most ambitious work to date, Apeirogon - named for a shape with a countably infinite number of sides - is a tour de force concerning friendship, love, loss, and belonging. Bassam Aramin is Palestinian. Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of conflict that colors every aspect of their daily lives, from the roads they are allowed to drive on, to the schools their daughters, Abir and Smadar, each attend, to the checkpoints, both physical and emotional, they must negotiate. Their worlds shift irreparably after ten-year-old Abir is killed by a rubber bullet and thirteen-year-old Smadar becomes the victim of suicide bombers. When Bassam and Rami learn of each other’s stories, they recognize the loss that connects them and they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace.
https://www.amazon.com/Apeirogon-Novel-Colum-McCann/dp/1400069602/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2YV6HK23SH752&keywords=colum+mccann&qid=1579781212&sprefix=colum+mccann%2Caps%2C-1&sr=8-1
2020
Colum McCann was born on February 28, 1965, in Dublin, Ireland.
Colum McCann studied at Clonkeen College. Then he attended the College of Commerce in Rathmines (now Technological University Dublin) where he received a degree in communications in 1984. He is also a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin.
Colum McCann began his career as a journalist in The Irish Press. He went to the United States with the intention of writing a Great American novel. In 1986 he embarked on a two-year bicycle tour of the United States. During that time, he worked as a taxi driver, bartender, bicycle mechanic, volunteer for a program in rural Texas for troubled urban youths, and apartment manager. Before moving to the United States, he also worked for such newspapers in Ireland as the Herald, Evening Press, and Connaught Telegraph. From 1984 till 1985 he worked at Evening Press as a youth correspondent. In 1992 he married Allison Hawke and they moved to Japan where McCann taught English as a foreign language and was writing his first collection, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, which was published in 1994. That same year the family moved to the United States.
Next year his first novel Songdogs about a photographer's son piecing together the details of his father's life was published. The second novel This Side of Brightness, a magnificent work of imagination and history set in the tunnels of New York City, was published in 1998. In 2000 McCann released Everything in This Country Must, two stories and a novella centered on "The Troubles" as experienced by three teenagers in modern-day Northern Ireland. Dancer (2003) is McCann's fictionalized biography of famed Russian defector and ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. It is not a biography in the classic sense, as much of the work is fictionalized, characters are created or meshed together, and events in Nureyev's life are imagined rather than reported. The book is more a character study of the many people in the dancer's life and the cultural changes that took place during his lifetime.
Zoli (2006) based loosely on the life of Gypsy poet, Papsuza, is written from multiple perspectives, that include both first and third-person narration. McCann's sales and critical reputation have grown steadily throughout his writing career, but it was his 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spin, that finally brought him widespread literary fame. Its central thread is Philippe Petit's famous tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974 and it follows the lives of several characters existing on the fringes of Manhattan society both then and in the present day. Many critics praised it as the first truly insightful novel tackling the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001.
One more recognized novel is TransAtlantic (2013). It tells the intertwined stories of Alcock and Brown (the first non-stop transatlantic fliers in 1919), the visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland in 1845/46, and the story of the Irish peace process as negotiated by Senator George Mitchell in 1998. The book fuses these stories with fictional narratives of women spanning the course of two centuries. His other books include Thirteen Ways of Looking, Letters to a Young Writer, more recent Apeirogon (2020), and others.
McCann’s fiction appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Tin House, Bomb, and several other places. He has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, Die Zeit, La Republicca, Paris Match, the Guardian, the Times and the Independent. The territory of McCann’s work is international in scope and geography - his topics have ranged from homeless people in the subway tunnels of New York to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, to the effects of 9/11, to a poetic examination of the life and culture of the Roma in Europe. He is known as a writer of style and substance, hailed by critics and readers alike. McCann teaches at Hunter College in New York, in the Creative Writing program, with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Tea Obreht as well.
(A Russian peasant who became an international legend, a C...)
2003(There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from...)
1994(A unique love story, a tale of loss, a parable of Europe,...)
2006(Everything in This Country Must turns to the troubles in ...)
2000(Colum McCann’s most ambitious work to date, Apeirogon - n...)
2020(In Thirteen Ways of Looking, McCann charts the territory ...)
2015(In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people...)
2009(Colum McCann creates in Songdogs a mesmerizing evocation ...)
1995(The novel TransAtlantic spans continents, leaps centuries...)
2013(In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves h...)
1998(Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophic...)
2017Colum McCann is very active in New York and Irish-based charities, in particular organizations such as the global charity Narrative 4 (narrative4.com) which he co-founded with Lisa Consiglio in June 2013, along with several other founding artists.
Among his major influences are Michael Ondaatje, John Berger, Don DeLillo, E.L Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Edna O’Brien, and Benedict Kiely.
Quotations:
"I believe in the democracy of storytelling. I love the fact that our stories can cross all sorts of borders and boundaries. I feel humbled by the notion that I’m even a small part of the literary experience. I grew up in a house, in a city, in a country shaped by books. I don’t know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story."
"The best writers attempt to become alternative historians. My sense of the Great Depression is guided by the works of Doctorow, for instance. My perception of Dublin in the early 20th century is almost entirely guided by my reading of Ulysses."
"I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something."
"The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own."
"There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it."
"Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told."
"People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect."
"Nobody falls halfway."
"Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't."
"Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important."
"Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off."
Colum McCann is a member of Aosdána, the Irish association of artists. He is also involved with the Irish Arts Centre, The Irish Repertory Theatre, Origin Theater, PEN, the New York Public Library, Art for Amnesty, the Norman Mailer Colony, and Roddy Doyle’s Fighting Words.
The book called The Second Best Children in the World by Mary Lavin is a book that McCann adored in his own childhood. He always goes back to the book Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje. He can always find something mesmeric there.
Quotes from others about the person
"Colum McCann is an extremely thoughtful and deeply passionate speaker (and just a great person, overall). He made a huge impact during his dinner remarks, where his emphasis on storytelling - listening to and learning the stories of others - tied extremely well to the main emphasis of our lecture series, the value of the humanities in today’s world."
"A writer of large and driving vision."
"McCann is a passionate writer whose impulse is always toward a generous understanding of his diverse characters."
"McCann is a novelist you should know a lot more about."
Colum McCann married Allison Hawke in 1992. The marriage produced three children, Isabella, John Michael, and Christian.