Irish writer Colm Tóibín was BOTD in 1955. Born in Enniscorthy in Wexford to schoolteacher parents, his childhood was affected by his father’s illness and eventual death, causing him to perform poorly at school and develop a stutter. He began writing poetry in high school, and became aware of his homosexuality, at the time a criminal offence in Ireland. He studied at University College Dublin, moving to Barcelona in 1975, where he worked as a journalist and began exploring his sexuality. He became a popular travel writer, notably his 1994 book The Sign of the Cross, recounting his pilgrimages through Catholic Europe. His third novel The Story of the Night, published in 1996, was his first book to openly explore gay scenes, serving as his public coming-out. His 1999 novel The Blackwater Lightship, a family drama about three generations of women caring for a son who is dying of AIDS, was highly praised, nominated for the Booker Prize and later made into a TV film starring Angela Lansbury. He explored his ambivalence about his new status as an openly gay man in 2001’s Love in a Dark Time, a collection of biographical portraits of queer writers Oscar Wilde, Roger Casement, Elizabeth Bishop and James Baldwin and filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. In his 2004 novel The Master, Tóibín reimagined the life of closeted gay writer Henry James, earning a second Booker Prize nomination. He is best known for his 2009 novel Brooklyn, a wistful (and entirely heterosexual) romance about a young Irishwoman who emigrates to 1950s New York. A critical and commercial success, it was successfully filmed in 2015 starring Saoirse Ronan. In a bracing change of pace, he published The Testament of Mary in 2012, an agnostic account of the life and crucifixion of Jesus through the eyes of his grieving mother Mary. Nominated again for the Booker Prize, it was adapted for the stage starring Fiona Shaw. His most recent novel, The Magician, imagined the latter years of German novelist Thomas Mann and his complex relationship with his gay children. In 2022, Tóibín was appointed Laureate for Irish Fiction. He has been in a relationship with editor Hedi El Kholti since 2012. His memoir, A Guest at the Feast, was published in 2011.