Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in Ireland in 1955 and was educated at University College Dublin where he read History and English. After graduating, he lived and taught in Barcelona, a city that he later wrote about in Homage to Barcelona (1990). He returned to Ireland and worked as a journalist before travelling through South America and Argentina. He is the author of a number of works of fiction and non-fiction and is a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines. He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 1995 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a member of Aosdána, an Irish organisation founded to promote the arts.

His novels include The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), The Story of the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and The Master (2004). He also writes non-fiction: The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe(1994) and The Irish Famine (1999) (with Diarmaid Ferriter). His latest books are Brooklyn (2009), winner of the 2009 Costa Novel Award; a collection of short stories, The Empty Family (2010); New Ways to Kill Your Mother (2012), a book of essays, and The Testament of Mary (2012), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. More recent work includes The Testament Of Mary (2012), Nora Webster (2014) and House of Names (2017).  

He was appointed Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 2017 while in 2021 he won the David Cohen Prize for Literature. His last novel, The Magician, won the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2022.