Colm Toibin

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2016

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway is the writer Colm Toibin.

Best-known for his novels "Brooklyn" - now made into a film - "Nora Webster" and "The Master," he has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times.

Born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, the second youngest of five children, Colm's life changed suddenly when his father died after a long illness when he was twelve. He says he has been dealing with the trauma which resulted in his writing ever since. After attending St Peter's College in Wexford and University College Dublin, he spent three years in Barcelona teaching English before returning to Ireland. He worked as a journalist until his books began to get published.

He once told a class he was teaching that "you have to be a terrible monster to write. I said, 'Someone might have told you something they shouldn't have told you, and you have to be prepared to use it because it will make a great story. You have to use it even though the person is identifiable. If you can't do it then writing isn't for you. You've no right to be here. If there is any way I can help you get into law school then I will. Your morality will be more useful in a courtroom.'"

Producer: Christine Pawlowsky.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. The My castaway this week is the writer, Comte-Tobin. His novels, plays and short stories give voice to highly regarded works dealing with identity, loss, notions of family and the meaning of home.
0:46.8	These days his own home is often Dublin, on occasion New York, now and then Barcelona and at times a little place near Enescorti, the town in
0:54.8	Southeast Ireland where he grew up and where, aged just 12, he would begin to write as a release
1:00.8	from speech. One of five children his father was a teacher at the local school,
1:05.7	his mother a published poet. The little front parlour of their family home boasted two bookcases
1:10.9	crammed with history volumes, yet interest in the past didn't preclude
1:15.3	engagement in the future. His grandfather became a political prisoner in the fight against British rule and his father was a member of the Republican Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna Fianna of the Republican Fianna Foyle Party.
1:25.2	It was shock at his father's sudden death and the untreated and untouched grief that it gave rise
1:29.6	to that would, many decades later, fuel a novel that was 14 years in the writing.
1:35.2	He says with writing thinking is often the enemy of rhythm.
1:39.8	You start something because an image, a character, a moment, a scene moves almost of its own accord
1:46.1	into rhythm. It seems to want to become a sentence. So calm, welcome. You have these homes
1:51.8	dotted all over the place. where and when do you write best?
1:55.0	I can write anywhere as long as there's a blank wall in front of me no great view and a pretty uncomfortable chair,
2:02.0	but I've been working a lot recently in Wexford in the
2:04.9	house you mentioned in the place where we went every summer in the years before my father
2:10.5	died. It's funny you know when I'm going down to the strand, the smell is the same smell.
2:16.4	Harvested fields, clover, but even animals, because we were from the town. So it's going right back into the past, which means I'm getting images.
2:26.0	And even if I'm not writing directly about it, it's quite emotional, even being there.
	...

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