Colm Tóibín wins this year's Rathbones Folio Prize for The Magician

Irish novelist Colm Tóibín has been awarded this year's Rathbones Folio Prize in recognition of his 2021 war-time novel, The Magician. 

This is the first time Tóibín has won this award after previously being shortlisted in 2015 for Nora Webster. The Rathbones Folio Prize is the only literary award in which all the works nominated for the prize are selected and judged by an academy of peers. It is also the only award to consider all works of literature, regardless of form.

In a statement about Tóibín's win, this year's judges, Tessa Hadley, William Atkins and Rachel Long, called The Magician “a capacious, generous, ambitious novel, taking in a great sweep of 20th-century history, yet rooted in the intimate detail of one man’s private life."

Long added that Tóibín's novel made her "fall in love with reading all over again."

The Magician begins at the onset of the Great War, following German author, essayist and social critic Thomas Mann. Like so many of his fellow countrymen, Mann is fired up with patriotism. Throughout the novel, he examines the dissonance between an idealised image of his homeland the darker, conflict-ridden reality.

Tóibín's decades-long career has produced a host of worldwide lauded works including 1990's The South, 2004's The Master, and 2009's Brooklyn. In December of last year, the celebrated author won the David Cohen Prize for Literature, a biennial award that recognises a living writer from the UK or Ireland for their achievements in literature. He was also recently appointed the Laureate for Irish Fiction.

Read Pat Carty's interview with Colm Tóibín in the current issue of Hot Press. He discusses growing up as a gay man in pre-Same Sex Marriage Ireland, the best way of reading Ulysses and his own battles with cancer.

“As Anne Enright said, as the first laureate, it's both an honour and a job,” he laughs. “You take both of those things seriously. "I'll be sixty-seven in May and I've published twelve works of fiction, so it's nice to get some sort of recognition in your own country," Tóibín said of recently being named the Laureate for Irish Fiction, 2022-2024. "It's certainly better than being banned or censored or ignored...'