An Irish voice echoes across cultures
On his fifth visit to the country, acclaimed author Colm Toibin discusses writing, migration and the difficult return to one's hometown, Zhang Kun reports in Shanghai.
Colm Toibin, one of the most celebrated and widely read writers in contemporary Irish literature, has made his fifth visit to China, embarking on a two-week book tour to five cities.
Toibin was in China to introduce his new novel Long Island, the Chinese translated edition, which was recently published by Archipel Press in collaboration with Shanghai Translation Publishing House.
Arriving on Sept 18, Toibin was at Shanghai's Theatre Young the following day, sharing a stage with Niao Niao, a well-known stand-up comedian, and Huang Yuning, deputy editor-in-chief of Shanghai Translation. They discussed the difficult homecoming for longtime exiles, the making of a writer, and the real differences between men and women.
He then traveled to Nanjing in Jiangsu province, Guangzhou in Guangdong province, Chengdu in Sichuan province, and to Beijing on Sept 27.
Born in Enniscorthy, Ireland, in 1955, Toibin published his first novel, The South, in 1990. Since then, he has published 11 novels, two collections of short stories, one collection of poetry and multiple dramas, travelogues and prose collections.
The Guardian listed Toibin as one of Britain's top 300 intellectuals, despite the fact that he is Irish. He is the recipient of the Irish PEN Award for Literature, the David Cohen Prize for Literature, and is an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Peng Lun, founding director of Archipel Press, has been the main Chinese publisher and promoter of Toibin in China for more than 10 years. Archipel Press, in collaboration with Shanghai Translation, has published 10 books by Toibin in Chinese, with the latest being Long Island, a sequel to his 2009 novel Brooklyn.
Brooklyn was published in 2009 and tells the story of Eilis Lacey, a young Irish immigrant in the 1950s torn between her new home in New York and her old home in Enniscorthy. The international best-seller was adapted into a movie starring Saoirse Ronan in 2015.
Long Island, which came out in 2024, picks up Eilis' story 25 years later, when she decides to make her first trip back to Ireland in 20 years to escape the pressure of having to accept an illegitimate child about to be born from her husband's affair with a married woman.
However, Toibin never planned to write a sequel to Brooklyn. "I hate sequels," the author says in Shanghai. "I hope no one does any more sequels … and I am really sorry." But he says an idea emerged and drew him back to the story of Eilis.
