Colum McCann

Colum McCann
200px May 2009 – Lyon, France
Born	Colum McCann (1965-02-28) 28 February 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 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Colum McCann (born 28 February 1965) is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland and now lives in New York. He is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Hunter College, New York with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Claire Messud, and has visited many universities and colleges all over the world, including the European Graduate School.

His work has been published in 35 languages and has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Paris Review, as well in several other places. He has written for the New York Times, Esquire, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, as well as many other international publications.

His novels include Songdogs, This Side of Brightness, Dancer, Zoli, Let the Great World Spin, and TransAtlantic.

Early life

McCann was born in Dublin in 1965 and studied journalism in the former College of Commerce in Rathmines, now the Dublin Institute of Technology. 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. He 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 over 12,000 kilometres.

In 1988 he moved to Texas where he worked as a wilderness educator with juvenile delinquents. He later went to the University of Texas where he graduated with a 4.0 grade point average 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 from 1993-94. During this time, Colum worked on his first collection of stories and taught English as a foreign language. In 1994, he moved to New York. He, his wife and their three children Isabella, John Michael, and Christian reside in New York.

On June 16, 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."

Career

File:McCann, unknown, Cahill, McCourt by David Shankbone.jpg

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 9th-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 an interview. "I love the fact that our stories can cross all sorts of borders and boundaries."

His short story "Everything in this Country Must" was made into a short film directed by Gary McKendry. It was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. His 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.

McCann's most recent novel TransAtlantic was published in June 2013. It spent several weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List.

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

McCann currently teaches on the Hunter College faculty as part of the MFA Creative Writing program.

Awards and honours

Esquire Magazine's named him "Best and Brightest" young novelist in 2003. A Pushcart Prize, Rooney Prize, Irish Novel of the Year Award and the 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award have also come his way. He is in Aosdána. He was inducted into the Hennessy Literary Awards Hall of Fame in 2005, having been named Hennessy New Irish Writer 15 years earlier. McCann was awarded Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government in 2009. He 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, he 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 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the 19th most lucrative literary award in the world. Afterwards, McCann lauded fellow nominees William Trevor and Yiyun Li, suggesting either would have been worthy winners instead. In 2012, the Dublin Institute of Technology gave him 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.

Philanthropy

In 2012, with a group of other writers, educators and social activists, McCann co-founded Narrative4, a global U.S.-based charity dedicated to social change, on which he sits as board chairman. Prior to his involvement in Narrative4 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 Fighting Words.

Bibliography

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Books

• Songdogs (1995)
• This Side of Brightness (1998)
• Everything in this Country Must (2000)
• Dancer (2003)
• Zoli (2006)
• Let the Great World Spin (2009)
• TransAtlantic (2013)
• The Book of Men, Curated by Colum McCann and the Editors of Esquire and Narrative 4 (2013)
• Thirteen Ways of Looking (2015)

Further reading

• Cusatis, John. Understanding Colum McCann. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011.(Online excerpt)
• Flannery, Eoin. "The Aesthetics of Redemption." Irish Academic Press, 2011.

External links

• Official website
• Colum McCann. Faculty Profile at European Graduate School Biography, bibliography, photos and video lectures