Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Ireland and is the author six novels, and most recently, a collection of short stories entitled The Empty Family and a collection of essays on Henry James called All a Novelist Needs. He has won the Irish PEN Award for Literature, the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and the LA Times Novel of the Year, and many more. Hermione Lee of the Guardian said of his work: "Colm Tóibín is a fine lyricist of yearning, exile and regret. The beautifully measured Brooklyn was a poignant history of leaving and returning home; The Master, his novel about Henry James, was heavy with memories of lost childhood and lost loves that had to be turned into art. The stories in The Empty Family – like the painful stories of family conflicts in his last collection, Mothers and Sons – are threaded through with regret and need."