Colm Tóibín and Seán Hewitt on A Guest at the Feast

Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy in 1955. He is the author of ten novels, including The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York. His new book, A Guest at the Feast, brings together essays about growing up in Ireland during radical change; about cancer, priests, popes, homosexuality, and literature.

Seán Hewitt is the author of the memoir All Down Darkness Wide, winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (2022), and the poetry collection Tongues of Fire, winner of the Laurel Prize (2021). He lives in Dublin, where he teaches at Trinity College.

Photo credit: Stuart Simpson / Penguin Random House