Colm Toibin is an Irish novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet. He is currently the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He has been short-listed 3 times for the Booker Prize and has won the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year, the Costa Novel of the Year, the Stonewall Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Irish PEN Award for his contribution to Irish literature. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a vice president of the Royal Society of Literature.