Colum McCann

Colum McCann is an Irish-American novelist and short story writer, one of the leading figures in contemporary Irish literature writing in English. Born in Dublin, Ireland, he has lived in the United States for many years and is a citizen of both countries. Let the Great World Spin (2009) won the National Book Award for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award. The novel interweaves multiple stories set in New York City on the day Philippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers in 1974. It is celebrated as a masterpiece of polyphonic narrative fiction. Apeirogon (2020), a hybrid novel about two fathers—an Israeli and a Palestinian—who lost daughters to the conflict, was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and won the Carnegie Medal in Literature in Ireland. TransAtlantic (2013) was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. McCann is the founder of Narrative 4, a global nonprofit organization that uses story exchange as an empathy-building tool. He has received the Ireland Fund's American Ireland Literary Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the Nikos Kazantzakis Prize. He teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College in New York, where he lives with his family.