Colum McCann

McCann is the author of eight novels, including Apeirogon (2020), TransAtlantic (2013) and the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin (2009). Three collections of short stories have been published, including Thirteen Ways of Looking, released in October 2015. American Mother was released in March 2024 and tells the story of Diane Foley, whose son, James Foley, was captured and killed by ISIS while serving as a freelance combat reporter in Syria. His latest novel, Twist, was released in March 2025.

Colum McCann studied at University of Texas at Austin and Clonkeen College. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is literary activity, journalism and creative writing. Jack Kerouac and Don DeLillo are recorded as an influence. Employment is recorded with European Graduate School, Paris Match and Hunter College. Works named in the authority record are Let the Great World Spin. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, AWB Vincent Literary Award, Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and National Book Award.

• Name — Colum McCann • Birth Name — Colum McCann • Born — 28 February 1965 • Birthplace — Dublin, Ireland • Occupation — Writer • Language — English • Education — Journalism • Alma Mater — Dublin Institute of Technology University of Texas at Austin • Genre — Literary fiction • Movement — Postmodern literature • Notable Works — Let the Great World Spin; Apeirogon TransAtlantic • Website — colummccann.com

McCann's mother is from Derry in Northern Ireland, and he spent summers with his family there. His father, Sean McCann, was features editor for the Evening Press newspaper in Dublin, and a prolific author. Colum remembers following his father around the newsroom and seeing the writing process in action. McCann started writing at age eleven, when he rode his bike around Dun Laoghaire reporting on local football matches for The Irish Press. Despite his father's advice to "not become a journalist", McCann began his career as a newspaper writer. He studied journalism at the College of Commerce in Rathmines, Dublin (now a part of the Technological University Dublin). While at school, he wrote for a number of newspapers, including the Irish Independent and the Evening Herald, and in 1983 he was named "Young Journalist of the Year". McCann has said that his time in newspapers gave him an excellent platform from which to launch a career in fiction.

McCann moved to the United States in the summer of 1986 to become a fiction writer. He first lived in Hyannis, Massachusetts, where he worked on a golf course and as a cab driver. That summer, he bought a typewriter and tried to write "the great Irish American novel", but quickly realized that he wasn't up to the task and that he'd need "to get some experience beyond my immediate white-bread world". Between 1986 and 1988 he took a bicycle across the United States, travelling 12,000 kilometres (about 8,000 miles). "Part of the reason for the trip was simply to expand my lungs emotionally", he said, to come in contact with what he calls "a true democracy of voices". During the trip, he stayed with Native Americans in Gallup, New Mexico, lived with Amish people in Pennsylvania, fixed bikes in Colorado, and dug ditches to help fight fires in Idaho. He found that the people he met would confide their deepest secrets in him, even though they had just met. He credits those voicesand that tripwith developing his ability to listen to other people. In 1988, he moved to Brenham, Texas, where he worked as a wilderness educator with at-risk youth. He spent two years finishing his undergraduate education at University of Texas at Austin and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. While at UT, a story he published in a campus literary magazine was included in Britain's Best Short Stories of 1993, an early success in his young literary career.

In 1993, McCann moved to Japan with his wife Allison, whom he had married the previous year. The couple both taught English, and McCann worked on finishing his first short-story collection, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, and started his first novel, Songdogs. After a year and a half, the couple moved back to New York City where he, his wife and their three childrenIsabella, John Michael, and Christianstill reside. In 1994, following the publication of Fishing the Sloe-Black River, McCann won the Rooney Prize, which is awarded to an "emerging Irish writer under forty years of age" with "an outstanding body of work". Though McCann's early works were well-reviewed, they were not commercially successful enough to support him full-time. Throughout the 1990s, McCann wrote plays and film scripts, including the Veronica Guerin bio-pic When the Sky Falls and the play Flaherty's Windows, which ran for six weeks Off-Broadway.

This Side of Brightness (1998) was McCann's first international bestseller. The novel revolves around the New York City subway, following the "sandhogs" who built its tunnels in the early 1900s and the homeless people who lived in the tunnels in the 1980s. He was inspired by two instances in the early 1900s when men were blown out of subway tunnels into rivers due to explosions. While researching the novel, McCann descended into the subway tunnels three or four times per week. He recalled that, "Being Irish helped meI was never seen as part of the established order, the system. I was outside. And they were outsiders too. So often I felt aligned with the people who were living underground." In 2000, McCann released Everything in This Country Must, a collection of two short stories and a novella about The Troubles. He grounded the three stories in the conflict, but maintains "an imaginative distance" between reality and his writing, a common sentiment in his works. McCann teamed up with Gary McKendry to turn the collection's titular story into a short film. After its 2004 release, the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in the 77th Academy Awards. McCann's next novel, Dancer, is a fictionalized account of Rudolf Nureyev's life. McCann spent the summer of 2001 teaching English in Russia to research the novel. The book was published on the tenth anniversary of Nureyev's death. For his 2006 novel Zoli, McCann expanded on previously explored themes such as exile, social outcasting, empathy, and fictionalizing historical events. The main character is a fictionalization of Polish-Romani poet Bronisława Wajs (Papusza). While researching the novel, McCann spent two months in Europe visiting Romani camps.

As of 2008 McCann was a Thomas Hunter Writer in Residence at Hunter College, New York. McCann's seventh book (his fifth novel) vaulted him into the international spotlight. Let the Great World Spin (2008) is set on 7 August 1974, the morning that Philippe Petit walked on a high wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The novel follows characters who live in New York City, some of whom saw Petit's walk. The book is an allegory to 9/11, but only mentions the attacks in one line. McCann's father-in-law worked in the North Tower and walked up to McCann's apartment on the Upper East Side after escaping the building. McCann's young daughter said her grandfather was "burning from the inside out", a line that struck McCann as a beautiful metaphor for the nation. Let the Great World Spin was received with great critical acclaim. For the book, McCann won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction, the first Irish-born writer to take home the award. The novel also won the 2011 International Dublin Literary Award, among many others. J. J. Abrams discussed working with McCann to make the novel into a movie.

Throughout the late 2010s, McCann travelled to the Middle East and started work on his seventh novel, Apeirogon. In the early stages of writing, he said "I'm going to write the novel that has not the two-state solution, but the two-story solution." Published in February 2020, the book shares the story of two men—one Israeli, and one Palestinian—whose daughters died in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rami Elhanan, an Israeli graphic designer, lost his daughter to a Palestinian suicide bomber. Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian scholar and previous political prisoner, lost his daughter to an IDF rubber bullet. The pair met in the Parents Circle, a cross-cultural group where parents whose children died due to the conflict can come together and share their stories. McCann calls Apeirogon his “Narrative 4 novel” due to its focus on empathy and unlikely connections. Apeirogon was positively received, gaining a place on the Booker Prize longlist and winning the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. His next book, American Mother, was released in March 2024. It tells the story of Diane Foley, whose son, James Foley, was captured and killed by ISIS while serving as a freelance combat reporter in Syria. Foley was once photographed while reading Let the Great World Spin, which floored McCann after Foley died: "There's a photograph of him online reading my book, Let the Great World Spin, and I was shocked by that, absolutely shocked. I was reading the news reports when he was killed, and I saw this photograph, and I looked at the book he was reading." His next novel, Twist, was released in March 2025.

• Illustration — McCann, Christy Kelly, Christopher Cahill and Frank McCourt at New York City's Housing Works bookstore for a tribute to the then-recently deceased Irish poet Benedict Kiely McCann used to write in a ninth-floor apartment sitting with a computer device on his lap on the floor of a cupboard with no windows located between "two very tight walls," surrounded by messages written by himself and others. "I believe in the democracy of storytelling," said McCann in a 2013 interview. "I love the fact that our stories can cross all sorts of borders and boundaries." "The best writers attempt to become alternative historians," McCann said. "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," McCann said in an interview. "In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important." Edna O'Brien told The New York Times "By The Book" that she would choose McCann to write her life story. Pope Francis quoted McCann in the afterword of the May 2022 book The Weaving of the World (La Tessitura del Mondo), sharing McCann's words that storytelling is “one of the most powerful means we have for changing our world” and "our great democracy" that we all have access to, which transcends borders, shatters stereotypes and "gives us access to the full flowering of the human heart". Bono told The New York Times "By The Book" that McCann's Apeirogon was one of the greatest books he had read recently, saying, "I love timeline transportations. I enjoy tangential views of a core theme. I not only discovered the word 'Apeirogon,' I rediscovered murmuration as a most powerful symbol for the times that are a changin' shape."

McCann is active in New York and Irish-based charities, in particular PEN, the American Ireland Fund, the New York Public Library, the Norman Mailer Colony, and Roddy Doyle's creative writing centre Fighting Words.

In June 2012, with Lisa Consiglio and a group of other writers, educators and social activists, McCann co-founded Narrative 4, a global nonprofit, and still serves as board president. Narrative 4's mission is to "harness the power of stories to equip and embolden young adults to improve their lives, communities and the world". "It's like a United Nations for young storytellers," McCann said. "The whole idea behind it is that the one true democracy we have is storytelling. It goes across borders, boundaries, genders, rich, poor—everybody has a story to tell." Following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012, two Newtown High School English teachers wrote to McCann telling him that they believed Let The Great World Spin could help their students work through their grief and trauma. In early 2013, McCann sent the teachers 68 copies of his book and drove up to Newtown to meet with students. From there, Newtown High School engaged in a story exchange with 180 students, as well as an exchange with students from Crane High School on the west side of Chicago. One of the teachers, Lee Keylock (who would go on to run curriculum development for the nonprofit), said that through the story exchange, “kids find out they have the same hopes and fears” no matter where they come from in the world. McCann views the story exchange, and his writings, as a bastion of hope in a world full of cynicism. He told the Newton High School students that, "You have to beat the cynics at their own game," and has said that he would go "bare knuckle" to defend the notion of hope. The bedrock of Narrative 4 is the story exchange. In this exercise, groups break off into pairs. In the pairs, each person tells the other person a story about themselves. Then they go back to the larger group and tell the other person's story in the first person, as if it had happened to them. McCann says that people often say they don't have a story to tell about themselves, but that's never the casehe believes everyone has a story to share. A litany of scientific studies have found that the story exchange increases empathy in its participants and encourages "prosocial actions". Narrative 4 works in schools and communities around the world, encouraging young people to tell stories. McCann has said, "I've always wanted to do something beyond the words on the page. To use the writing to engage more on a ground level." Narrative 4 has offices both in New York and in Limerick, Ireland.

McCann has three children with his wife Allison. On 16 June 2009, McCann published a Bloomsday remembrance in The New York Times of his long-deceased grandfather, whom he met only once, and of finding him again in the pages of James Joyce's Ulysses. McCann wrote, "The man whom I had met only once was becoming flesh and blood through the pages of a fiction." McCann has written about his father, a journalist as well. In his essay "Looking for the Rozziner," first published in Granta magazine, McCann said, "It may have stretched towards parodybygod the man could handle a shovel, just like his old manbut there was something acute about it, the desire to come home, to push the body in a different direction to the mind, the need to be tired alongside him in whatever small way, the emigrant's desire to root around in the old soil."

• Songdogs, Phoenix, 1995. • This Side of Brightness, Picador, 1998. • Dancer, Picador Modern Classics, 2003., • Zoli, Random House, 2006. • Let the Great World Spin, Random House, 2009., • TransAtlantic, Random House, 2013., • Apeirogon, Random House, 2020. • Twist, Random House, 2025. ISBN 9798217070398

• Collections * • Everything in this Country Must, Picador, 2000. • Thirteen Ways of Looking. New York: Random House, 2015., • Anthologies • The Book of Men. Curated by Colum McCann and the editors of Esquire and Narrative 4 (2013) • Stories • Title — Publication — Collected in • "Tresses" — Sunday Tribune (1990) — - • "Sisters" — Analecta (1992) — Fishing the Sloe-Black River • "Through the Field" — The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction (1994) • "Breakfast for Enrique" — Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1994) • "A Basket Full of Wallpaper" • "Fishing the Sloe-Black River" • "Step We Gaily, On We Go" • "Stolen Child" • "From Many, One" • "Around the Bend and Back Again" • "Along the Riverwall" • "A Word in Edgewise" • "Cathal's Lake" • "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" — Story (Spring 1997) — - • "The First Snow" — Grand Street 63 (Winter 1998) — excerpt from This Side of Brightness • "Everything in This Country Must" — The Atlantic (July 1998) — Everything in This Country Must • "Hunger Strike" — GQ (November 1998) • "Sumac" — Story (Spring 1999) — - • "As If There Were Trees" — Story (Autumn 1999) — - • "Wood" — The New Yorker (November 29, 1999) — Everything in This Country Must • "All That Rises, All That Falls" — Esquire (December 2003) — - • "What Is It Called, Your Country, Behind the Mountain?" — Best New Irish Stories (2005) — - • "This Is the House That Horse Built" — Bomb 108 (Summer 2009) — excerpt from Let the Great World Spin • "Soldier's Field" — Esquire (October 2011) — - • "Transatlantic" — The New Yorker (April 6, 2012) — excerpt from Transatlantic • "What Time Is It Now, Where You Are?" — The Washington Post (November 17, 2013) — Thirteen Ways of Looking • "Sh'khol" — Zoetrope: All-Story (Fall 2014) • "Treaty" — Esquire (August 2015) • "Thirteen Ways of Looking" — Thirteen Ways of Looking (2015)

• American Mother (co-written with Diane Foley), Etruscan Press, March 2024

• His Life Was Too Boring for a Memoir. So He Wrote Ireland's.". The New York Times (15 March 2022) • Til' Human Voices Wake Us: What If This Virus Can Teach Us to Change Ourselves?". TIME (1 May 2022) • No Rest For The Wired Alexander (13 April 2022) • How to be hopeful: Colum McCann on the broken violin that played in a refugee camp" The Guardian (16 March 2019) • The school without a skyline The Independent (23 July 2017) • So you want to be a writer? Essential tips for aspiring novelists" The Guardian (13 May 2017) • Irish Author Colum McCann Tackles a Bottle of Hibiki Japanese Harmony Whisky" The Wall Street Journal (28 September 2015) • Inner Worlds: The Word Shed. The New Yorker (22-29 December 2014) • "What baseball does to the soul". The New York Times (30 March 2012) • "My ugly, lovely town - an essay by Colum McCann". The Stinging Fly (Winter 2011–12) • "Dessert". The New Yorker (12 September 2011) • "Looking for the Rozziner". Granta Magazine (2011) • "The word made flesh". The American Scholar (1 December 2010) • "But always meeting ourselves". The New York Times (15 June 2009) • "No place like home". The New York Times (31 December 2006)

Colum McCann was born on 28 February 1965 in Dublin. McCann held the nationality of Ireland and United States. McCann was educated at University of Texas at Austin and Clonkeen College. McCann worked as screenwriter, novelist, writer and journalist, and the authority record catalogues a further 2 occupations under the same name, among them university teacher and teacher. McCann was employed by European Graduate School, Paris Match and Hunter College. McCann worked in English.

• Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice. HarperCollins, 2017..

McCann's work has been published in over 40 languages, and has appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker, Esquire, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, as well as other international publications. Among his honors are the U.S. National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, several major European awards, and an Oscar nomination. McCann has received a Pushcart Prize, Rooney Prize, Irish Novel of the Year Award and the 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award. Esquire Magazine named him "Best and Brightest" young novelist in 2003. He is a member of Aosdána, and was inducted into the Hennessy Literary Awards Hall of Fame in 2005, having been named Hennessy New Irish Writer 15 years earlier. McCann won the National Book Award in 2009, for Let the Great World Spin. He was also that year honoured as Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government. He has also received the Deauville Festival Literary Prize: the Ambassador Award, the inaugural Medici Book Club Prize and was the overall winner of the Grinzane Award in Italy. McCann spoke at the 2010 Boston College First Year Academic Convocation, about his book Let the Great World Spin. In 2009, Let the Great World Spin was named Amazon.com's "Book of the Year". In 2010, McCann received a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He received a literary award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011 and became a full member in 2014. Let the Great World Spin won the 2011 International Dublin Literary Award, one of the more lucrative literary awards in the world. Afterwards, McCann lauded fellow nominees William Trevor and Yiyun Li, suggesting that either would have been worthy winners instead. In 2025, Amazon named Let The Great World Spin one of the best books of the past 25 years. In 2012, the Dublin Institute of Technology gave McCann an honorary degree. In 2013, he received an honorary degree from Queen's University, Belfast. Transatlantic was long-listed for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, he was named a finalist for The Story Prize for Thirteen Ways of Looking. On 27 July 2020 he was again long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, this time for Apeirogon.