Colm Tóibín in conversation with Lucy Caldwell

We are delighted to welcome to the Festival Colm Tóibín in conversation with Lucy Caldwell to discuss his new novel Long Island. 

ln Long Island Colm reunites us with the heroine of his 2009 novel, Brooklyn. We find Eilis Lacey 20 years on, in the 1970s, living with her husband, Tony Fiorello, and children on Long Island, rather too close to her Fiorello in-laws. A shocking piece of news propels Eilis back to Ireland, to a world she thought she had long left behind and to ways of living, and loving, she thought she had lost. 

Colm Tóibín is a selected writer for our Festival Reading Group in May. Join Jenn Murray (who played ‘Dolores in the film version of Brooklyn) for a conversation about the novel Brooklyn, on 1 May and 29 May, in the lead up to the Festival event. Click here to sign up to the Reading Group.

Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of eleven novels, including The Master, Brooklyn, and The Magician, and two collections of stories. He has been three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2021, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Tóibín was appointed the Laureate for Irish Fiction 2022-2024.

Lucy Caldwell, a patron of the Belfast Book Festival, is the author of four novels, most recently These Days, which won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, three short story collections, Multitudes, Intimacies, and the forthcoming Openings (May 2024), and several stage plays and radio dramas. 

She is also the editor of Being Various, the latest volume in the ongoing Faber series of New Irish Short stories. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 2021 she won the prestigious BBC National Short Story Award for her story All the People Were Mean and Bad, and in 2022 was awarded the EM Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.