Summer Books Special: Novelist, essayist, raconteur Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín onstage at the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival with The Bookshelf's Kate Evans — on fiction, fridges, rain, hinges, melodrama, reading, and why he can't write American dialogue so every character he writes has to be Irish (except, of course, when they're Thomas Mann and family). This is a conversation that begins in his hometown of Enniscorthy, site of his novels Nora Webster, The Blackwater Lightship, Brooklyn and Long Island — and the site of his memories and overheard conversations — and moves on to his bookshelves, writing, and the story of a tongue. Really.