Colm Tóibín: ‘A book wouldn’t improve Trump’
The author of Brooklyn and The Master discusses fathers and families, the new wave of female Irish novelists – and the only time he wishes he owned a TV
Colm Tóibín is an award-winning Irish writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. He is also a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, New York. He was born in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, the setting for several of his books, and educated at University College Dublin. His novels include The Master, Nora Webster and The House of Names. The film adaptation of Brooklyn, about a young Irish emigrant to New York, earned three Oscar nominations in 2015. His latest book, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce, is published by Penguin this week.
When did you get the idea to write a book about the fathers of Joyce, Yeats and Wilde?
It began with an invite from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, to give the 2017 Ellmann lectures, which are in honour of Richard Ellmann, the great American critic and biographer of Joyce, Yeats and Wilde. I started to think about all three writers and because I had loved that book of Yeats’s father’s letters [Letters to His Son WB Yeats and Others, 1869-1922 by John Butler Yeats]. I started to think of them in relation to their fathers and decided that would be my subject. By the time I had written the lectures, I found myself having nearly written a book.