42 Facts About Colum McCann

Colum McCann was born in Dublin, Ireland, and now lives in New York.

Colum McCann is the co-founder and president of Narrative 4, an international empathy education nonprofit.

Colum McCann has written three collections of short stories, including Thirteen Ways of Looking, released in October 2015.

Colum McCann's mother was from Derry in Northern Ireland, and McCann would spend summers with his family there.

Colum McCann fondly remembers following his father around the newsroom and seeing the writing process in action.

Colum McCann started his writing journey at age eleven, when he rode his bike around the Dun Laoghaire borough, reporting on local soccer matches for the Irish Press.

Colum McCann studied journalism at the College of Commerce in Rathmines, Dublin.

Colum McCann has said that his time in the Irish newspapers gave him an excellent platform from which to launch a career in fiction.

Colum McCann moved to the United States in the summer of 1986 to become a fiction writer.

Colum McCann first lived in Hyannis, Massachusetts, where he worked on a golf course and as a cab driver.

Colum McCann found that the people he met would confide their deepest secrets in him, even though they had just met.

Colum McCann spent two years finishing his undergraduate education at University of Texas at Austin and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

In 1993, Colum McCann moved to Japan with his wife Allison, whom he had married the previous year.

The couple both taught English, and Colum McCann worked on finishing his first short-story collection, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, and started his first novel, Songdogs.

In 1994, following the publication of Fishing the Sloe-Black River, Colum McCann won the Rooney Prize, which is awarded to an "emerging Irish writer under forty years of age" with "an outstanding body of work".

Colum McCann was inspired by two instances in the early 1900s when men were blown out of subway tunnels into rivers due to explosions.

In 2000, Colum McCann released Everything in This Country Must, a collection of two short stories and a novella about The Troubles.

Colum McCann grounded the three stories in the conflict, but maintains "an imaginative distance" between reality and his writing, a common sentiment in his works.

Colum McCann teamed up with Gary McKendry to turn the collection's titular story into a short film.

Colum McCann's next novel, Dancer, is a fictionalized account of Rudolf Nureyev's life.

Colum McCann spent the summer of 2001 teaching English in Russia to research the novel.

Colum McCann's father-in-law worked in the North Tower and walked up to Colum McCann's apartment on the Upper East Side after escaping the building.

JJ Abrams discussed working with Colum McCann to make the novel into a movie.

In 2010, Colum McCann put his words in a different medium, collaborating with Alonzo King to put on a ballet titled Writing Ground.

Colum McCann's poetry is in the ballet's program but was not spoken in the dances itself.

Each week throughout 2016, Colum McCann wrote a blog post giving a piece of advice to young writers.

Colum 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.

Colum McCann is a member of Aosdana, and was inducted into the Hennessy Literary Awards Hall of Fame in 2005, having been named Hennessy New Irish Writer 15 years earlier.

Colum McCann won the National Book Award in 2009, for Let The Great World Spin.

Colum McCann was that year honoured as Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government.

Colum McCann has 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.

Colum 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.

Additionally, in 2010, Colum McCann received a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Colum McCann received a literary award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011 and became a full member in 2014.

Colum McCann used to write in a ninth-floor apartment sitting with a computer device on his lap on the floor of a cupboard with no windows located between "two very tight walls," surrounded by messages written by himself and others.

Edna O'Brien told The New York Times "By The Book" that she would choose Colum McCann to write her life story.

Colum McCann is active in New York and Irish-based charities, in particular PEN, the American Ireland Fund, the New York Public Library, the Norman Mailer Colony, and Roddy Doyle's creative writing centre Fighting Words.

In June 2012, with Lisa Consiglio and a group of other writers, educators and social activists, Colum McCann co-founded Narrative 4, a global nonprofit, and still serves as board president.

In early 2013, Colum McCann sent the teachers 68 copies of his book and drove up to Newtown to meet with students.

Colum McCann 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.

On 16 June 2009, Colum 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.

Colum McCann has written about his father, a journalist as well.