Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, and poet. Tóibín was born on May 30, 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland and studied at University College Dublin.

Tóibín is the fourth of five siblings. His father was a teacher, politically active, and interested in history. His mother left school at 14, but was what he calls an "energetic reader."

When he and his brother Niall were 8 and 4, their father suffered "some sort of brain aneurysm" and was hospitalized in Dublin. Their mother dropped them off at an aunt's house 35 miles away. They stayed for several months, during which time their mother never visited, wrote, or called. They never knew if or when she would come back. When their father returned home, they did too, but their mother remained distant. Unsurprisingly, the emotionally distant mother who uproots her children and leaves them with relatives is a recurrent character in his fiction. 

Tóibín didn't learn to read until he was nearly 10 and he developed a stammer that has remained with him, though he has learned to control it. He was considered "stupid" until he went to boarding school after his father's death, and was no longer attending the high school where his brilliant father had taught.

Tóibín left Ennescorthy at 17 to go to University College Dublin and hasn't returned there  full time ever since, though he has a home there. He found it difficult to be a gay man in Ireland and left after university to live in Barcelona for several years before returning home to become a journalist and eventually a novelist and poet. He never told his mother he was gay, though she asked his sister whether he was happy, and he sent back word that he was. "I think that's an Irish thing." He also never talked with her about why she left him and his brother with her sister. That's an Irish thing, too.

He has said that the relationship that finally saved him is the one between writer and reader. One way he tightens that bond is not to describe the character physically. "By not describing them, you begin to make their perception so intimately involved with the reader's perceptions that it allows the reader to enter into their spirit and become them." He refers to this technique as the first-person intimate, rather than first-person singular.

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.