Colm Tóibín And Seán Hewitt On A Guest At The Feast

5x15 welcomes Colm Tóibín, novelist, critic, essayist and one of the most highly acclaimed writers of our time.

In his new essay collection A Guest at the Feast, Tóibín traverses life in all its complexity, capturing moments that are both melancholy and amusing, rich and strange. Travelling between the streets of Buenos Aires and a deserted Venice, and the works of writers such as John McGahern and Marilynne Robinson, these essays uncover the places where life and fiction overlap.

Don't miss the chance to hear this most erudite and important storyteller, live in conversation with award-winning poet and author Seán Hewitt.


Praise for Colm Tóibín and A Guest at the Feast

'The clarity of the novelist's descriptive ability shines through essays on topics ranging from his treatment for cancer to the joys of an empty Venice . . . On every subject, Tóibín's writing is what people these days inevitably describe as nuanced, a word that has become a kind of shorthand for expressing a person's rare ability to understand . . . the foibles of others' - Rachel Cooke, Observer, Book of the Day

'I love everything Colm Tóibín has written' - Nicola Sturgeon, New Statesman

'I wanted to read out loud, to fully savour writing that is so careful and so lyrical' - Laura Hackett, Sunday Times


Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy in 1955. 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.

Seán Hewitt is the author of the memoir All Down Darkness Wide, winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (2022), and the poetry collection Tongues of Fire, winner of the Laurel Prize (2021). He lives in Dublin, where he teaches at Trinity College.

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