Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award

Book-length works by recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award (2006-2010) and Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award (2011-) are arranged below in alphabetical order by author. To find an individual honoree’s works, click on her or his name.

Lifetime Achievement Award

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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce

Colm Toibin

Elegant, profound, and riveting, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways these men surface in their work. Through these stories of fathers and sons, Tóibín recounts the resistance to English cultural domination, the birth of modern Irish cultural identity, and the extraordinary contributions of these complex and masterful authors.
A Guest at the Feast

Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín's touching memoir, A Guest at the Feast, beautifully read by the author himself. A Guest at the Feast moves from the small town of Enniscorthy to Dublin, from memories of a mother who always had a book on the go to the author's early adulthood, from a love of literature to the influences of place and family. Tóibín's captivating memoir is the story of a writer coming of age and his connections between home, work and love. It is a perfect gem of a book.
Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border

Colm Tóibín

Soon after the Anglo-Irish agreement, Colm Toibin travelled along the Irish border from Derry to Newry. In this work he tells of fear and anger, and of the historical legacy that has imprinted itself on the landscape and its inhabitants.
Beauty in a Broken Place

Colm Tóibín

Toibin's drama brilliantly re-enacts and evokes the personalities and workings of the Abbey Theatre in 1926. Lady Gregory, Yeats and O'Casey defend their daring play against the stifling mores of the day and the rule of the rabble and the widows of the 1916 leaders. It is a timely reminder of the perennial conflict between the demands of art and of politics in Irish cultural life. As Sean O'Casey addresses the ghost of Lady Gregory he recalls Yeats' Monday evening gatherings and early visits to Coole Park, and the staging, rehearsal and enacting of The Plough and the Stars, itself commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the 1916 Rising. This inner drama has walk-on parts for the principals: Abbey manager Lennox Robinson, directors WB and Mrs Yeats, government-appointed board-member George O'Brien, actors Shelagh Delaney, Ria Mooney, Miss Crowe and McCormack, and street demagogues Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, Mrs Tom Pearse and Maud Gonne protesting the mockery of martyrs.
Brooklyn: A Novel

Colm Tóibín

Hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Colm Tóibín's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.
Homage to Barcelona

Colm Tóibín

This book celebrates one of Europe's greatest cities -- a cosmopolitan city of vibrant architecture and art, great churches and museums, intriguing port life and extravagant nightclubs, restaurants and bars. It moves from the story of the city's founding, and huge expansion in the nineteenth century, to the lives of Gaudi, Miro, Casals and Dali. It also examines the history of Catalan nationalism, the tragedy of the Civil War, the Franco years, and the transition from dictatorship to democracy which Colm Tóibín witnessed in the 1970s.
House of Names: A Novel

Colm Tóibín

A retelling of the story of Clytemnestra and her children in the legendary Greek city of Mycenae, describes how at the side of her lover she plots to murder her long-absent husband for his betrayals and infidelities. By the award-winning author of The Master.
Lady Gregory's Toothbrush

Colm Tóibín

In this remarkable biographical essay, Colm Tóibín examines the contradictions that defined Lady Gregory, an essential figure in Irish cultural history. She was the wife of a landlord and member of Parliament who had been personally responsible for introducing measures that compounded the misery of the Irish peasantry during the Great Famine. Yet, Lady Gregory devoted much of her creative energy to idealizing that same peasantry, while never abandoning the aristocratic hauteur, the social connections, or the great house that her birth and marriage had bequeathed to her.
Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature

Colm Tóibín

Tóibín examines the life and work of some of the greatest and most influential writers of the past two centuries, figures whose homosexuality remained hidden or oblique for much of their lives, either by choice or necessity. The larger world couldn't know about their sexuality, but in their private lives, and in the spirit of their work, the laws of desire defined their expression.
Martyrs and Metaphors

Colm Tóibín

An essay dealing with the relationship between literature and public life in Ireland.
Mothers and Sons

Colm Tóibín

Mothers and Sons is a deeply penetrating and beautifully written meditation on the dramas surrounding this most elemental of relationships. Each of the nine stories focuses on a moment in which an unspoken balance shifts; in which a mother or son do battle, or experience a sudden crisis, thus leaving their conception of who they are subtly or seriously altered.
New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their Families

Colm Tóibín

In his essay on Tennessee Williams, the author reveals an artist profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, he examines a world of family relations, and in Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents illuminates an Ireland reinvented. From John Cheever's journals he makes fresh this darkly comic misanthrope and his intimates. Educating an intellectual woman, Cheever remarked, is like letting a rattlesnake into the house. In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, the author illuminates the intimate connections between writers and their families, but also articulates the great joy of reading their work.
Nora Webster: A Novel

Colm Tóibín

"From one of contemporary literature's bestselling, critically acclaimed and beloved authors, a magnificent new novel set in Ireland, about a fiercely compelling young widow and mother of four, navigating grief and fear, struggling for hope. Set in Wexford, Ireland, Colm Tóibín's superb seventh novel introduces the formidable, memorable and deeply moving Nora Webster. Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world to which she was born. And now she fears she may be drawn back into it. Wounded, strong-willed, clinging to secrecy in a tiny community where everyone knows your business, Nora is drowning in her own sorrow and blind to the suffering of her young sons, who have lost their father. Yet she has moments of stunning empathy and kindness, and when she begins to sing again, after decades, she finds solace, engagement, a haven--herself. Nora Webster is a masterpiece in character study by a writer at the zenith of his career, "beautiful and daring" (The New York Times Book Review) and able to "sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations" (USA TODAY). In Nora Webster, Tóibín has created a character as iconic, engaging and memorable as Madame Bovary or Hedda Gabler"-- Provided by publisher
On Elizabeth Bishop

Colm Tóibín

"In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences--the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling double portrait that will intrigue readers interested in both Bishop and Tóibín."--Jacket
The Blackwater Lightship

Colm Tóibín

With AIDS about to claim a well-loved young man, three generations of his family are reunited at his bedside in Ireland, in a novel that explores the nature of love and the complex interrelationships among family members.
The Empty Family: Stories

Colm Tóibín

A collection of short fiction includes "The Street," in which Pakistani workers in Barcelona pursue a taboo affair; and "Two Women," in which a taciturn Irish set designer confronts repressed emotions while working in her homeland.
The Heather Blazing

Colm Tóibín

Eamon Redmond is a much admired and successful judge in Dublin, happily married to Carmel and father of two grown-up children. Every summer the family stays in a beautiful house on the coast at Ballyconnigor. It is here, one summer, that Eamon reflects on his life as a judge.
The Kilfenora Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan

Colm Tóibín

Over the past twenty years, Paul Durcan has become an essential presence in Irish life, and is internationally known for his poetry. This is the first full-length study of his work, a critical evaluation of the essential themes in his poems. Contributions from fellow poets (Derek Mahon, Ruth Padel, Eamon Grennan) and critics (Edna Longley, Brian Kennedy, Fintan O'Toole) make this a vital and significant assessment of one of the most original poets writing in the English language. The book's title is that of one of his most famous poems.--From the publisher
The Master: A Novel

Colm Tóibín

Nineteenth-century writer Henry James is heartbroken when his first play performs poorly in contrast to Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" and struggles with subsequent doubts about his sexual identity.
The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction

Colm Tóibín

A compilation of the best in Irish short fiction includes excerpts from Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," James Joyce's "The Dead," and works by Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, Emma Donoghue, Bram Stoker, and other notable authors.
The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe

Colm Tóibín

Between 1990 and 1994, Colm Tóibín made a series of trips through Catholic Europe. His journey led him into close contact with people from all walks of life, from priests to politicians, from the intellectually open to the spiritually bigoted. He then set down his impressions in this beautifully written book, filled with personal detail set within its historical context.
The South

Colm Tóibín

Katherine leaves behind a failed marriage in southern Ireland to find fulfilment in a new life in Spain. Moving in with a group of artists, she begins to discover her real self - and the country sheleft behind. Winner of the 1991 Irish Times-Aer Lingus prize for a first work of fiction.
The Story of the Night

Colm Tóibín

Set in Argentina in the 1980s, this novel follows the progress of a lonely young man trying to live openly with his homosexuality. His coming out mirrors the country's emergence from the repressive rule of the Generals to tentative new hope under the early Menem government.
The Testament of Mary

Colm Tóibín

A provocative imagining of the later years of the mother of Jesus finds her living a solitary existence in Ephesus years after her son's crucifixion and struggling with guilt, anger, and feelings that her son is not the son of God and that His sacrifice was not for a worthy cause.
The Trial of the Generals: Selected Journalism

Colm Tóibín

Tóibín traveled widely in South America, settling for a time in Buenos Aires. There he attended and reported the trial of the generals responsible for the Falklands War and for the disappearance of untold numbers of Argentine citizens.