Colum McCann

Colum McCann
May 2009 – Lyon, France
Born	Colum McCann (1965-02-28) February 28, 1965 Dublin, Ireland
Occupation	Writer
Language	English
Nationality	Irish, American
Education	Journalism
Alma mater	Dublin Institute of Technology
Genre	Literary fiction
Literary movement	Postmodern literature
Notable works	Let the Great World Spin; TransAtlantic
Notable awards	Rooney Prize Novel of the Year Award National Book Award International Dublin Literary Award
Website
colummccann.com

Colum McCann is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and now lives in New York. He is a Thomas Hunter Writer in Residence at Hunter College, New York.

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.

McCann is the author of seven novels, including TransAtlantic (2013) and the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin (2009). He has also written three collections of short stories, including Thirteen Ways of Looking, released in October 2015.

Early life

McCann was born in 1965 in Dublin and studied journalism in the former College of Commerce in Rathmines, which became part of the Dublin Institute of Technology and which became the Technological University Dublin in 2019. He became a reporter for The Irish Press Group, and had his own column and byline in the Evening Press by the age of 21. McCann has said that his time in the Irish newspapers gave him an excellent platform from which to launch a career in fiction.

McCann moved to the United States in 1986 and worked for a short period in Hyannis, Massachusetts. Between 1986 and 1988 he took a bicycle across the United States, travelling more than 12,000 kilometres. "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." In 1988 he moved to Texas, where he worked as a wilderness educator with juvenile delinquents. He later graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He began writing the stories that later comprised his first collection, Fishing the Sloe-Black River.

Personal life

McCann and his wife Allison lived in Japan for eighteen months in 1993–94. During this time, he worked on his first collection of stories and taught English part-time as a foreign language. In 1994, they moved to New York, where he, his wife and their three children – Isabella, John Michael, and Christian – still reside.

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 parody – bygod the man could handle a shovel, just like his old man – but 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."

Career

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 writes 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."

His short story "Everything in this Country Must" was made into a short film directed by Gary McKendry, which in 2005 was nominated for an Academy Award. McCann's 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin is an allegory of 9/11 using the true story of Philippe Petit as a "pull-through metaphor". J. J. Abrams discussed working with McCann to make the novel in to a movie.

His most recent collection of stories, Thirteen Ways of Looking, was released in October 2015, winning a Pushcart Prize. The story "Sh'khol" was included in The Best American Short Stories 2015. The story "What Time is it Now, Where You Are?" was short-listed for the Writing.ie Short Story of the Year 2015. and for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2016.

McCann has spoken at a variety of notable events, including the 2010 Boston College First Year Academic Convocation, about his book Let the Great World Spin.

Awards and honours

McCann has been honoured with numerous awards throughout his career, including a Pushcart Prize, Rooney Prize, Irish Novel of the Year Award and the 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award, and 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.

In 2010, Let the Great World Spin was named Amazon.com's "Book of the Year." Additionally, 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. 15 June 2011 brought the announcement that Let the Great World Spin had 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 2012, the Dublin Institute of Technology gave McCann an honorary degree. In 2013, he received an honorary degree from Queen's University, Belfast. In 2016, he was named a finalist for The Story Prize for Thirteen Ways of Looking.

On 27 July 2020 he was long-listed for the Booker prize for his novel Apeirogon.

Philanthropy

In 2012, with a group of other writers, educators and social activists, McCann co-founded Narrative 4, a global nonprofit, on which he sits 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." 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 in both New York and in Limerick, Ireland.

Prior to his involvement in Narrative 4, McCann was very 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.

Bibliography

Novels

• Songdogs, Phoenix, 1995. ISBN 1897580282
• This Side of Brightness, Picador, 1998. ISBN 0312421974
• Dancer, New York : Picador Modern Classics, 2003. ISBN 9781250051790, OCLC 830020868
• Zoli, Random House, 2006. ISBN 1400063728
• Let the Great World Spin, Random House, 2009. ISBN 9781408803226, OCLC 893296551
• TransAtlantic, Random House, 2013. ISBN 9781400069590, OCLC 852653036
• Apeirogon, Random House, 2020

Short fiction

Collections

• Fishing the sloe-black river. London: Phoenix House. 1994. ISBN 9780312423384. OCLC 54798875.
• Everything in this Country Must, Picador, 2000. ISBN 0312273185
• Thirteen Ways of Looking New York: Random House, 2015. ISBN 9780812996722, OCLC 966414193

Anthologies

• The Book of Men. Curated by Colum McCann and the editors of Esquire and Narrative 4 (2013)

Stories

Title	Year	First published	Reprinted/collected	Notes
"Transatlantic"	2012	"Transatlantic". The New Yorker. 88 (9): 94–103. 16 April 2012.		Excerpt from TransAtlantic.

Essays and reporting

• 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)
• 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)
• "The word shed". Inner Worlds. The New Yorker. 90 (41): 64. 22–29 December 2014.
• "What baseball does to the soul". The New York Times (30 March 2012) 0362–4331. Retrieved 2016-02-01.
• "My ugly, lovely town - an essay by Colum McCann". www.stingingfly.org (Winter 2011–12).
• "Dessert". The New Yorker (12 September 2011).
• "Looking for the Rozziner". Granta Magazine (2011)
• "The word made flesh". www.theamericanscholar.org (1 December 2010).
• "But always meeting ourselves". The New York Times (15 June 2009). 0362–4331.
• "No place like home". The New York Times (31 December 2006). ISSN 0362-4331.

Essay collections

• Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice. Harper Collins, 2017. ISBN 9780399590801.

Further reading

• Cardin, Bertrand. Colum McCann's Intertexts: Books Talk to one Another. Cork University Press, 2016.[1]
• Cusatis, John. Understanding Colum McCann. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011.
• Dibbell, Jeremy. "Colum McCann: LibraryThing Author Interview". Library Thing. Retrieved 29 April 2014.
• Flannery, Eoin. "The Aesthetics of Redemption." Irish Academic Press, 2011.
• Ingersoll, Earl G, and Mary C. Ingersoll. Conversations with Colum McCann. University Press of Mississippi, 2017.
• Miceli, Barbara. “Peace, Freedom and Cooperation through the Atlantic Crossing in Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic” in Susanna Nanni and Sabrina Vellucci (ed.) Circolazione di Persone e di idee.Integrazione ed esclusione tra Europa e Americhe, Bordighera Press, 2019, pp. 53–68.

External links

• Official website
• Narrative 4 website