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Colum McCann (born February 28, 1965) is an Irish people writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and currently resides in New York. He is known as an international writer who believes in the "democracy of storytelling." He has won numerous awards, including the U.S. National Book Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, and his work has been published in over 40 languages as well as being published in many American and international publications. He also is the co-founder and president of Narrative 4, an international empathy education nonprofit.
McCann is the author of eight novels, including Apeirogon (2020), TransAtlantic (2013) and the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin (2009). He has also written three collections of short stories, including Thirteen Ways of Looking, released in October 2015. American Mother was released in March 2024 and tells the story of Diane Foley, whose son, James Foley, was captured and killed by Islamic State while serving as a freelance combat reporter in Syria. His latest novel, Twist, was released in March 2025.
Despite his father's advice to "not become a journalist", McCann began his career as a newspaper writer. He studied journalism at the College of Commerce in Rathmines, Dublin (now a part of the Technological University Dublin). While at school, he wrote for a number of newspapers, including the Irish Independent and the Evening Herald, and in 1983 he was named "Young Journalist of the Year". McCann has said that his time in newspapers gave him an excellent platform from which to launch a career in fiction.
During the trip, he stayed with Native Americans in Gallup, New Mexico, lived with Amish people in Pennsylvania, fixed bikes in Colorado, and dug ditches to help fight fires in Idaho. He found that the people he met would confide their deepest secrets in him, even though they had just met. He credits those voicesand that tripwith developing his ability to listen to other people.
In 1988, he moved to Brenham, Texas, where he worked as a wilderness educator with at-risk youth. He spent two years finishing his undergraduate education at University of Texas at Austin and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. While at UT, a story he published in a campus literary magazine was included in Britain's Best Short Stories of 1993, an early success in his young literary career.
Though McCann's early works were well-reviewed, they were not commercially successful enough to support him full-time. Throughout the 1990s, McCann wrote plays and film scripts, including the Veronica Guerin bio-pic When the Sky Falls and the play Flaherty's Windows, which ran for six weeks Off-Broadway.
In 2000, McCann released Everything in This Country Must, a collection of two short stories and a novella about The Troubles. He grounded the three stories in the conflict, but maintains "an imaginative distance" between reality and his writing, a common sentiment in his works. McCann teamed up with Gary McKendry to turn the collection's titular story into a short film. After its 2004 release, the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in the 77th Academy Awards.
McCann's next novel, Dancer, is a fictionalized account of Rudolf Nureyev's life. McCann spent the summer of 2001 teaching English in Russia to research the novel. The book was published on the tenth anniversary of Rudolf Nureyev death.
For his 2006 novel Zoli, McCann expanded on previously explored themes such as exile, social outcasting, empathy, and fictionalizing historical events. The main character is a fictionalization of Polish-Romani poet Bronisława Wajs (Papusza). While researching the novel, McCann spent two months in Europe visiting Romani people camps.
McCann was a Thomas Hunter Writer in Residence at [[Hunter College]], New York.
McCann's seventh book (his fifth novel) vaulted him into the international spotlight. Let the Great World Spin (2008) is set on 7 August 1974, the morning that Philippe Petit walked on a high wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The novel follows characters who live in New York City, some of whom saw Petit's walk. The book is an allegory to 9/11, but only mentions the attacks in one line. McCann's father-in-law worked in the North Tower and walked up to McCann's apartment on the Upper East Side after escaping the building. McCann's young daughter said her grandfather was "burning from the inside out", a line that struck McCann as a beautiful metaphor for the nation.
Let the Great World Spin was received with great critical acclaim. For the book, McCann won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction, the first Irish-born writer to take home the award. The novel also won the 2011 International Dublin Literary Award, among many others. J. J. Abrams discussed working with McCann to make the novel into a movie.
In 2013, McCann published his eighth book, TransAtlantic. Like many of McCann's other books, the novel uses multiple characters and voices to tell a story based on real events. The book tells the intertwined stories of Alcock and Brown (the first non-stop transatlantic fliers in 1919), the visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland in 1845/46, and the story of the Irish peace process as negotiated by Senator George Mitchell in 1998. At first, McCann thought about just writing about Douglass's visit, but he said "then it would have been a historical novel and ... hate the term ... It just seems steeped in aspic. I mean every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered." McCann lived just a few blocks from Senator Mitchell in New York City, but did not meet him until he finished a draft of the book.
In the summer of 2014, McCann was assaulted outside a hotel in New Haven, Connecticut, while trying to help a woman who was being beaten up on the street. McCann told The Irish Times that "The irony of it all is that I was at a conference on 'Empathy' at Yale University with a non-profit I’m involved in, Narrative 4." At this point, he had already started writing his next short story collection, Thirteen Ways of Looking. The book contains three short stories and a novella, each beginning with a stanza from Wallace Stevens's poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". Though the titular story is about an on-street assault, he wrote it before being attacked. After Thirteen Ways of Looking
Each week throughout 2016, McCann wrote a blog post giving a piece of advice to young writers ( posted on his website here). The edited collection, Letters to a Young Writer, was published by Random House in 2017.
In 2019, McCann returned to playwriting, collaborating with Aedin Moloney to write Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom. The one-woman show is adapted from James Joyce's novel Ulysses and centers around the Molly Bloom soliloquy. The show ran at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2019, online in 2020, and again at the Irish Rep in 2022.
His next book, American Mother, was released in March 2024. It tells the story of Diane Foley, whose son, James Foley, was captured and killed by Islamic State while serving as a freelance combat reporter in Syria. Foley was once photographed while reading Let the Great World Spin, which floored McCann after Foley died: "There's a photograph of him online reading my book, Let the Great World Spin, and I was shocked by that, absolutely shocked. I was reading the news reports when he was killed, and I saw this photograph, and I looked at the book he was reading."
His next novel, Twist, was released in March 2025.
Among his numerous honors are the U.S. National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, several major European awards, and an Oscar nomination.
McCann has been honoured with numerous awards throughout his career, including a Pushcart Prize, Rooney Prize, Irish Novel of the Year Award and the 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award, and Esquire Magazine named him "Best and Brightest" young novelist in 2003. He is a member of Aosdána, and was inducted into the Hennessy Literary Awards Hall of Fame in 2005, having been named Hennessy New Irish Writer 15 years earlier.
McCann won the National Book Award in 2009, for Let The Great World Spin. He was also that year honoured as Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government. He has also received the Deauville Festival Literary Prize: the Ambassador Award, the inaugural Medici Book Club Prize and was the overall winner of the Grinzane Award in Italy.
McCann has spoken at a variety of notable events, including the 2010 Boston College First Year Academic Convocation, about his book Let the Great World Spin.
In 2009, Let the Great World Spin was named Amazon.com's "Book of the Year." Additionally, in 2010, McCann received a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He received a literary award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011 and became a full member in 2014. 15 June 2011 brought the announcement that Let the Great World Spin had won the 2011 International Dublin Literary Award, one of the more lucrative literary awards in the world. Afterwards, McCann lauded fellow nominees William Trevor and Yiyun Li, suggesting that either would have been worthy winners instead. In 2025, Amazon named Let The Great World Spin one of the best books of the past 25 years.
In 2012, the Dublin Institute of Technology gave McCann an honorary degree. In 2013, he received an honorary degree from Queen's University, Belfast. Transatlantic was long-listed for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, he was named a finalist for The Story Prize for Thirteen Ways of Looking.
On 27 July 2020 he was again long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, this time for Apeirogon.
"I believe in the democracy of storytelling," said McCann in a 2013 interview. "I love the fact that our stories can cross all sorts of borders and boundaries."
"The best writers attempt to become alternative historians," McCann said. "My sense of the Great Depression is guided by the works of Doctorow, for instance. My perception of Dublin in the early 20th century is almost entirely guided by my reading of Ulysses." "I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something," McCann said in an interview. "In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important."
Edna O'Brien told The New York Times "By The Book" that she would choose McCann to write her life story.
Pope Francis quoted McCann in the afterword of the May 2022 book The Weaving of the World (La Tessitura del Mondo), sharing McCann's words that storytelling is “one of the most powerful means we have for changing our world” and “our great democracy” that we all have access to, which transcends borders, shatters stereotypes and “gives us access to the full flowering of the human heart.”
Bono told The New York Times "By The Book" that McCann's Apeirogon was one of the greatest books he had read recently, saying, "I love timeline transportations. I enjoy tangential views of a core theme. I not only discovered the word 'Apeirogon,' I rediscovered murmuration as a most powerful symbol for the times that are a changin' shape."
Following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012, two Newtown High School English teachers wrote to McCann telling him that they believed Let The Great World Spin could help their students work through their grief and trauma. In early 2013, McCann sent the teachers 68 copies of his book and drove up to Newtown to meet with students. From there, Newtown High School engaged in a story exchange with 180 students, as well as an exchange with students from Crane High School on the west side of Chicago. One of the teachers, Lee Keylock (who would go on to run curriculum development for the nonprofit), said that through the story exchange, “kids find out they have the same hopes and fears” no matter where they come from in the world.
McCann views the story exchange, and his writings, as a bastion of hope in a world full of cynicism. He told the Newton High School students that, "You have to beat the cynics at their own game," and has said that he would go "bare knuckle" to defend the notion of hope.
The bedrock of Narrative 4 is the story exchange. In this exercise, groups break off into pairs. In the pairs, each person tells the other person a story about themselves. Then they go back to the larger group and tell the other person's story in the first person, as if it had happened to them. McCann says that people often say they don't have a story to tell about themselves, but that's never the casehe believes everyone has a story to share. A litany of scientific studies have found that the story exchange increases empathy in its participants and encourages "prosocial actions."
Narrative 4 works in schools and communities around the world, encouraging young people to tell stories. McCann has said, "I've always wanted to do something beyond the words on the page. To use the writing to engage more on a ground level." Narrative 4 has offices both in New York and in Limerick, Ireland.
On 16 June 2009, McCann published a Bloomsday remembrance in The New York Times of his long-deceased grandfather, whom he met only once, and of finding him again in the pages of James Joyce's Ulysses. McCann wrote, "The man whom I had met only once was becoming flesh and blood through the pages of a fiction."
McCann has written about his father, a journalist as well. In his essay "Looking for the Rozziner," first published in Granta magazine, McCann said, "It may have stretched towards parody bygod the man could handle a shovel, just like his old manbut there was something acute about it, the desire to come home, to push the body in a different direction to the mind, the need to be tired alongside him in whatever small way, the emigrant's desire to root around in the old soil."
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| Fishing the Sloe-Black River |
| The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction (1994) |
| Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1994) |
| "A Basket Full of Wallpaper" |
| "Fishing the Sloe-Black River" |
| "Step We Gaily, On We Go" |
| "Stolen Child" |
| "From Many, One" |
| "Around the Bend and Back Again" |
| "Along the Riverwall" |
| "A Word in Edgewise" |
| "Cathal's Lake" |
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| excerpt from This Side of Brightness |
| Everything in This Country Must |
| GQ (November 1998) |
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| Everything in This Country Must |
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| excerpt from Let the Great World Spin |
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| excerpt from Transatlantic |
| Thirteen Ways of Looking |
| (Fall 2014) |
| Esquire (August 2015) |
| Thirteen Ways of Looking (2015) |
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