Colum McCann

Colum McCann – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Colum McCann (born February 28, 1965) is an Irish writer celebrated for Let the Great World Spin, TransAtlantic, Apeirogon, and more. This detailed biography covers his early life, narrative philosophy, major works, influence, and memorable lines.

Introduction

Colum McCann is a compelling voice in contemporary literary fiction, known for weaving large-scale historical and political events with intimate human stories. His writing is marked by a belief in what he calls the “democracy of storytelling” — that every life, however small, has a story worth hearing. His novels often cross borders, blend voices, and insist on empathy as both a method and a moral aim.

Early Life and Education

Colum McCann was born on 28 February 1965 in Dublin, Ireland. He was raised in Deansgrange, a southern suburb of Dublin. His mother was from Derry, Northern Ireland, and he spent summers with that branch of his family, exposing him to cross-border perspectives and histories. His father, Sean McCann, worked as a features editor for the Evening Press in Dublin and was an avid writer himself. Young Colum often followed his father through newsroom spaces, absorbing the rhythms of journalism.

As a youth, McCann showed early writing instincts: around age eleven, he used his bicycle to cover local football matches in Dún Laoghaire, sending reports to The Irish Press.

He studied journalism at the College of Commerce in Rathmines, Dublin (now part of Technological University Dublin). While there, he wrote for Irish papers including Irish Independent and Evening Herald, and in 1983 was awarded “Young Journalist of the Year.”

Becoming a Writer: Journeys & Influences

Travel, Work, and Experiments

After college, McCann’s path included considerable geographic and experiential movement. In the late 1980s, he journeyed across the U.S. by bicycle, traversing landscapes, meeting diverse communities (e.g. with Native American, Amish, rural groups), and collecting stories from the margins. He worked as a wilderness educator with at-risk youth, and then completed further study at the University of Texas at Austin.

These experiences shaped his conviction that authors must listen — that narratives from the periphery or cross-cultural spaces are vital. He has remarked that the people he met often confided their deepest secrets to him even in brief encounters, teaching him empathy and the weight of voice.

He also lived in Japan in the early 1990s (teaching English with his wife), where he worked on his early writing (short stories, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, Songdogs). Afterward, he and his wife relocated to New York City, where they have resided with their children.

Career and Major Works

Early Publishing & Experimentation

McCann’s first published works included Fishing the Sloe-Black River, a collection of short stories, and his debut novel Songdogs (mid-1990s). In 1998, This Side of Brightness appeared and became his first international bestseller. Its setting partly centers on New York subways and the “sandhogs” who built underground tunnels — an exploration of infrastructure, invisibility, and human struggle.

He also published Everything in This Country Must (2000), a collection dealing with The Troubles in Northern Ireland, blending political tension and imaginative distance. His novel Dancer (2003) is a fictionalized biography of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. His novel Zoli (2006) is a reimagining of the life of Romani poet Bronisława Wajs (Papusza), exploring exile, language, identity, and persecution.

Breakthrough: Let the Great World Spin and Beyond

A watershed in McCann’s career was Let the Great World Spin (2009). Set on 7 August 1974, the novel is anchored to the real event of Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in New York. The book interweaves multiple voices: cab drivers, nuns, recoverers of bodies, people touched by trauma and surprise. The novel received widespread acclaim, winning the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 2009 — making McCann the first Irish-born author to receive it. Later, it also won the International Dublin Literary Award.

McCann followed with TransAtlantic (2013), a novel that spans centuries and continents, linking the stories of Frederick Douglass’s visit to Ireland, the first non-stop transatlantic flight (Alcock & Brown, 1919), and Irish American and peace-process narratives. In 2015, Thirteen Ways of Looking was published— a short story collection where each piece is prefaced by a stanza from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. The book earned critical praise and a Pushcart Prize.

In 2020, he published Apeirogon, a bold narrative that tells the stories of two grieving fathers—one Israeli, one Palestinian—whose daughters were killed in the conflict. The book is structured around 1,001 short sections and strives to fold together testimony, history, and grief. In 2024, McCann released American Mother (with Diane Foley), a work of nonfiction focused on Diane Foley, mother of journalist James Foley, killed by ISIS. His newest novel Twist was released in March 2025. It explores themes such as environmental destruction, continental cables, colonial legacies, and human fragility beneath modern infrastructures.

Philosophy, Style & Themes

Democracy of Storytelling & Radical Empathy

McCann often speaks of the democracy of storytelling — that every voice, however marginalized, is worthy and capable of creating empathy across divides. He co-founded Narrative 4 (in 2012), a nonprofit focused on global story exchange and fostering empathy through sharing and retelling others’ stories.

McCann’s narrative style is characterized by multi-voiced structure, shifting perspectives, lyrical but grounded prose, and a weaving of the intimate with the epic. He often centers interconnectedness, trauma, memory, and witnessing in his work. He experiments with form: Apeirogon’s 1,001 sections, Thirteen Ways of Looking’s dialogue with Stevens’s poem, or Twist’s metaphorical use of undersea cables.

Teaching & Literary Presence

McCann holds a professorship in Creative Writing at Hunter College (CUNY), New York. He is also Writer-in-Residence / Professor of Contemporary Literature at the European Graduate School (EGS). He has been honored with, among others, membership in Aosdána (the Irish arts academy), a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres title from France, and multiple international literary awards.

Legacy, Influence & Impact

• McCann’s works have been translated into over 40 languages and published internationally.

• His awards include the National Book Award, International Dublin Literary Award, Pushcart Prize, and several European honors.

• Through Narrative 4, his influence extends to educational and community contexts—bringing storytelling practices into classrooms and social justice settings.

• Critics and peers often note McCann’s ability to combine moral urgency with formal daring, and to make the margins feel central.

• His recent work continues to show a willingness to tackle difficult, even dangerous, themes: conflict, environmental fragility, grief, power, and agency.

Selected Quotes

“I believe in the democracy of storytelling. That stories can cross all sorts of borders and boundaries.” “If you’re going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something.” In Twist, McCann reflects:
“Novels can put a little crack in the wall … you disrupt conventional thinking.” Speaking about Apeirogon, he has said he wanted “not the two-state solution, but the two-story solution.”

Lessons from Colum McCann

1. Listen deeply — McCann shows that stories emerge from attentiveness to people, places, and silences.

2. Bring the margin to the center — He elevates voices typically unseen and reorients narrative focus.

3. Blend the global and the intimate — His works remind us that big themes (war, migration, grief) live inside individual lives.

4. Experiment bravely — Form and structure are tools to reflect meaning, not constraints to avoid.

5. Use art for empathy — Across his fiction and his nonprofit work, McCann treats storytelling as a bridge, not just entertainment.

Conclusion

Colum McCann is a writer of urgency and grace, someone for whom fiction is both craft and moral vocation. From Dublin to New York, from war zones to underwater cables, his writing insists that every life is an intersection of history, memory, loss, and hope. His novels, short stories, and public initiatives continue to challenge readers and writers alike to hold complexity, discomfort, and connection in equal measure.

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