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Biography
Irish

Colum McCann

1965

Colum McCann is an Irish novelist who writes about the moments when disparate lives collide — often using real historical events as the framework for fiction of extraordinary ambition and empathy. Let the Great World Spin (2009) — a novel about New York City on the day Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers in 1974 — won the National Book Award. Apeirogon (2020) — about an Israeli and a Palestinian father who both lost daughters to the conflict — was his most politically urgent work.

Past sales0
PeriodContemporary
NationalityIrish
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Colum McCann (b. 1965) was born on 28 February 1965 in Dublin, Ireland. He studied journalism at the University of North Texas and has lived in New York since the early 1990s. He is a professor at Hunter College and co-founder of Narrative 4, a global storytelling organisation.

Life and Career

His early novels — Songdogs (1995), This Side of Brightness (1998, about New York’s sandhogs and subway tunnels) — established his preoccupation with outsiders and the hidden lives beneath surfaces.

Dancer (2003) — a biographical novel about Rudolf Nureyev told from multiple perspectives — demonstrated his ability to inhabit historical figures. Zoli (2006) — about a Romani poet in postwar Czechoslovakia — continued this approach.

Let the Great World Spin (2009) — structured around Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, connecting the lives of a dozen New Yorkers whose stories radiate outward from that central image — won the National Book Award for Fiction. It is a novel about connection, grief, and the possibility of beauty in a city of strangers.

TransAtlantic (2013) — weaving together three transatlantic crossings (Frederick Douglass, Alcock and Brown, George Mitchell) — continued his exploration of the Irish-American relationship.

Apeirogon (2020) — about Rami Elhanan (Israeli) and Bassam Aramin (Palestinian), real fathers who both lost daughters and now work together for peace — was his most formally daring novel: 1,001 short sections (echoing One Thousand and One Nights) that circle around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Major Works and Themes

McCann writes about empathy — the possibility of understanding across divides of nation, class, race, and language. His fiction insists that strangers’ lives are connected.

Key Works

  • Let the Great World Spin (2009)
  • TransAtlantic (2013)
  • Apeirogon (2020)

Collecting McCann

Songdogs (1995, Phoenix House) — his debut — brings $30–$100.

Let the Great World Spin (2009, Random House) — the National Book Award winner — brings $20–$60.