Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, essayist, playwright and poet, most famous for his novel Brooklyn. Tóibín is currently Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University in Manhattan and has been called one of Great Britain’s ＂three hundred public figures leading our cultural discourse＂ by The Observer (despite being Irish). He has won such accolades as the Booker Prize, the Stonewall Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Irish PEN Award for his contribution to Irish literature, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.