Colum McCann
McCann is the author of seven novels, including Apeirogon (2020), TransAtlantic (2013) and the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin (2009).
[8] McCann started his writing journey at age eleven, when he rode his bike around the Dun Laoghaire borough, reporting on local soccer matches for the Irish Press.
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".
"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".
[14] Throughout 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.
[17] He spent two years finishing his undergraduate education at University of Texas at Austin and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.
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.
[19] 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".
He grounded the three stories in the conflict, but maintains "an imaginative distance" between reality and his writing, a common sentiment in his works.
[23] For his 2006 novel Zoli, McCann expanded on previously explored themes such as exile, social outcasting, empathy, and fictionalizing historical events.
Like many of McCann's other books, the novel uses multiple characters and voices to tell a story based on real events.
"[38] McCann lived just a few blocks from Senator Mitchell in New York City, but did not meet him until he finished a draft of the book.
[39] In the summer of 2014, McCann was assaulted outside a hotel in New Haven, Connecticut, while trying to help a woman who was being beaten up on the street.
[40] McCann told The Irish Times that "The irony of it all is that I was at a conference on 'Empathy' at Yale University with a non-profit I’m involved in, Narrative 4.
[42] The book contains three short stories and a novella, each beginning with a stanza from Wallace Stevens's poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird".
The one-woman show is adapted from James Joyce's novel Ulysses and centers around the Molly Bloom soliloquy.
Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian scholar and previous political prisoner, lost his daughter to an IDF rubber bullet.
[52] Apeirogon was positively received, gaining a place on the Booker Prize longlist and winning the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger.
"[55] His work has been published in over 40 languages,[19] and has appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker, Esquire, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, as well as other international publications.
[63] 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.
[67][68] Afterwards, McCann lauded fellow nominees William Trevor and Yiyun Li, suggesting that either would have been worthy winners instead.
[70] 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.
Edna O'Brien told The New York Times "By The Book" that she would choose McCann to write her life story.
[74] 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”.
[citation needed] 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.
[77][78][79] 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".
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.
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.
[83] A litany of scientific studies have found that the story exchange increases empathy in its participants and encourages "prosocial actions".
[87] 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.
