Colum McCann

Colum McCann is an Irish writer of literary fiction.

He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and now lives in New York.

He is the co-founder and President of Narrative 4, an international empathy education nonprofit.

He is also a Thomas Hunter Writer in Residence at Hunter College, New York.

He is known as an international writer who believes in the "democracy of storytelling."

Among his numerous honors are the U.S National Book Award, the Dublin Literary Prize, several major European awards, and an Oscar nomination.

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.

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.

McCann was born in 1965 in Dublin.

The fourth of five children, he grew up in Deansgrange, a southern suburb of the city.

His mother was from Derry in Northern Ireland, and McCann would spend summers with his family there.

His father, Sean McCann, was the features editor for the Dublin Evening Press and a prolific author.

Colum fondly remembers following his father around the newsroom and seeing the writing process in action.

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.

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 in school, he wrote for a number of Irish 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 the Irish 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".

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.

He found that the people he met would confide their deepest secrets in him, even though they had just met.

He credits those voices—and that trip—with developing his ability to listen to other people.

In 1988, he moved to Brenham, Texas, where he worked as a wilderness educator with juvenile delinquents.

He spent two years finishing his undergraduate education at University of Texas at Austin and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

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.

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 children—Isabella, John Michael, and Christian—still 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.

This Side of Brightness (1998) was McCann's first international bestseller.

He has also written three collections of short stories, including Thirteen Ways of Looking, released in October 2015.

His next book, American Mother, released 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 next novel, Twist, is set to be released in 2025.

McCann is the author of seven novels, including Apeirogon (2020), TransAtlantic (2013) and the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin (2009).