COLUM McCANN

Colum McCann, is the award-winning author of three novels and two short story collections. Originally from Ireland, Mr. McCann has lived and traveled in many countries, including an 18-month bicycle trip across North America. His fiction has been praised by critics as brave, concise, penetrating, and uniquely international. For This Side of Brightness, Mr. McCann lived with the homeless people of the subway tunnels of Manhattan. In his novel Dancer, he investigated lives both real and imagined in order to create a daring fictional portrait of the world-famous dancer Rudolf Nureyev. In the year 2000, Joyce Carol Oates wrote of Mr. McCann’s short story collection Everything in This Country Must, “no more beautifully cadenced and moving collection of short fiction is likely to appear this year.”

Mr. McCann’s awards for writing include the Irish Novel of the Year Award for Dancer, the Writer of the Year Award from Esquire Magazine 2003, the inaugural Princess Grace Memorial Award 2002, The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Butler Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Hennessy Award for Irish Writing. He has been a contributor to The New York Times, The Times of London, the New Yorker, GQ, Atlantic Monthly, and several other publications. His work has been published in 20 different languages. He has also written several screenplays.