His fellow artists elected him to Aosdána and he won the biennial "UK and Ireland Nobel"[4] David Cohen Prize in 2021.

[1][8] His grandfather, Patrick Tobin, participated in the Easter Rising in April 1916, and was subsequently interned at Frongoch in Wales, while an uncle was involved in the IRB during the Irish Civil War.

[1] Following the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922, Tóibín's family favoured the Fianna Fáil political party.

[16] He is interested in tennis and plays the game for leisure; upon meeting Roger Federer, Tóibín enquired as to his opinion on the second serve.

[6] Tóibín lives in Southside Dublin City's Upper Pembroke Street, where on occasions his friends — such as playwright Tom Murphy and former Gate Theatre director Michael Colgan — assembled for social interaction and entertainment.

[17][18] Tóibín spent his prize money from his 2006 International Dublin Literary Award on building a house near Blackwater, County Wexford, where he holidayed as a child.

[1] He possesses a personal key to the private gated park at Dublin's Fitzwilliam Square, which is shut to ordinary members of the public.

[1] In 2019, Tóibín spoke about having survived testicular cancer, which spread to multiple organs, including a lung, liver, and lymph node.

[19][20] Tóibin calls Henry James his favourite novelist; he is especially fond of The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.

[1] In July 1972, aged 17, he had a summer job as a barman in the Grand Hotel in Tramore, County Waterford, working from six in the evening to two in the morning.

[3] A sequel to Brooklyn titled Long Island was released in May 2024, described by a review in Guardian as "a masterclass in subtlety and intelligence".

[29] Tóibín has written many non-fiction books, including Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (1994) (reprinted from the 1987 original edition) and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994).

In his 2012 essay collection New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families he studies the biographies of James Baldwin, J. M. Synge, and W. B. Yeats, among others.

[31] In June 2016, Tóibín visited Israel, as part of a project by the "Breaking the Silence" organization, to write an article for a book on the Israeli occupation, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War.

[32][33] The book was edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, and was published in June 2017 under the title Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation.

[1] In 2015, ahead of a referendum on marriage in Ireland, Tóibín delivered a talk titled "The Embrace of Love: Being Gay in Ireland Now" in Trinity Hall, featuring Roger Casement's diaries, the work of Oscar Wilde, John Broderick, Kate O'Brien, and Senator David Norris's 1980s High Court battles.

[41] Tóibín founded the Dublin-based publishing imprint, Tuskar Rock Press, with his agent Peter Straus.

The "Wexford" novels (The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship) use Enniscorthy, the town of Tóibín's birth, as narrative material, together with the history of Ireland and the death of his father.

It can be read together with The Heather Blazing as a diptych of Protestant and Catholic heritages in County Wexford, or it can be grouped with the "living abroad" novels.

A third topic that links The South and The Heather Blazing is that of creation, of painting in the first case and of the careful wording of a judge's verdict in the second.

This third thematic line culminated in The Master, a study on identity, preceded by a non-fiction book on the same subject, Love in a Dark Time.

As described by The New Yorker in 2021, his characters are "careful in conversation, each utterance fraught with importance... [his] novels typically depict an unfinished battle between those who know what they feel and those who don't, between those who have found a taut peace within themselves and those who remain unsettled.

[43] Arts Council director Mary Cloake called Tóibín "a champion of minorities" as he collected the 2011 Irish PEN Award.

[44] In 2017, Tóibin objected to the wording of an Arts Council letter, which was attempting to regulate artists and force them to produce a constant supply of work if they wanted to be paid a basic income (which would also be withdrawn if they were "temporarily incapacitated due to ill-health").

"[45] He referred to his personal experience with another writer: "I draw your attention to the fact that John McGahern published no novel between 1979 and 1990.