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Ship in Full Sail: The Laureate Lectures and Other Writings
272 pages, Paperback
Published September 4, 2025
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About the author
Colm Tóibín
239 books5,604 followersColm Tóibín FRSL, is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic, and poet. Tóibín is currently Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University in Manhattan and succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 2, 2026
Reading this feels like being invited to Toibin's house and being regaled with stories from his two years as Irish Laureate for Fiction — mostly harking back to the creative process in his past, so you can see how it all came together. He mines his whole life from his teenager years in Ennisorthy to the present day. The collection is pure meta: Tóibín thinking out loud about writing, memory, influence, and inspiration. Like going backstage at the Abbey instead of sitting in the front of house.
He begins with Irish traditional music, moves into fathers and sons, memory, painters, poets, and novelists.
There’s a reflection on The Heather Blazing — a book about memory — which I still remember my father ridiculing: “That’s shite,” he said. But here Tóibín reframes it through Eamon Redmond’s childhood recollections of Ballyconnigar in Wexford after his mother died — and it struck me how easily it could have been my father’s story too.
Wexford keeps resurfacing: the light, the beach at Ballyconnigar, memories rendered almost like a watercolour exhibition. There are pieces on Eugene McCabe, on Michael Scott and Louis le Brocquy, on Borges and Bioy, on Seamus Heaney’s letters, on census returns as sources of narrative, and on Henry James noting names he’d later smuggle into fiction. There’s a gem on “Last Movements” — what Yeats, Beethoven, and Thomas Mann created near the end of their lives.
He ranges widely: Dylan at the Liceu, Bob Dylan’s setlists, Tony Blair’s election night, the doublespeak of Ireland in the 1980s and 90s, Justine McCarthy and Charlie Haughey, Thom Gunn’s life in San Francisco, Irish military archives, pension applications that reveal more about ordinary lives than official histories. John Broderick appears — banned, buried, and overdue for rediscovery.
One standout essay places him in a hospital for cancer treatment on the site of Bloom’s house at 7 Eccles Street — thinking of Bloom coming in and out of his head. It may be the best piece in the book. Another explores AI and creativity: he asks ChatGPT to write in his style and analyses whether it rang true. It didn't.
There are reflections on plotless novels (Solar Bones, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing), on how inspiration might come from a photograph, a glance— learning how artists actually work.
Some essays feel like elegies: Rosa, who died young; the historians; lost houses like 15 Usher’s Island; Eileen Gray and the loss of her childhood home.
What stands out most is how generous, curious, and alive the thinking is. This isn’t just literary criticism — it’s cultural memory, autobiography, intellectual wandering, and a testament to what it means to write, read, remember, and notice. The Irish Times called it a cornucopia, and that feels right.
Similar to Annie Ernaux the Years.
He begins with Irish traditional music, moves into fathers and sons, memory, painters, poets, and novelists.
There’s a reflection on The Heather Blazing — a book about memory — which I still remember my father ridiculing: “That’s shite,” he said. But here Tóibín reframes it through Eamon Redmond’s childhood recollections of Ballyconnigar in Wexford after his mother died — and it struck me how easily it could have been my father’s story too.
Wexford keeps resurfacing: the light, the beach at Ballyconnigar, memories rendered almost like a watercolour exhibition. There are pieces on Eugene McCabe, on Michael Scott and Louis le Brocquy, on Borges and Bioy, on Seamus Heaney’s letters, on census returns as sources of narrative, and on Henry James noting names he’d later smuggle into fiction. There’s a gem on “Last Movements” — what Yeats, Beethoven, and Thomas Mann created near the end of their lives.
He ranges widely: Dylan at the Liceu, Bob Dylan’s setlists, Tony Blair’s election night, the doublespeak of Ireland in the 1980s and 90s, Justine McCarthy and Charlie Haughey, Thom Gunn’s life in San Francisco, Irish military archives, pension applications that reveal more about ordinary lives than official histories. John Broderick appears — banned, buried, and overdue for rediscovery.
One standout essay places him in a hospital for cancer treatment on the site of Bloom’s house at 7 Eccles Street — thinking of Bloom coming in and out of his head. It may be the best piece in the book. Another explores AI and creativity: he asks ChatGPT to write in his style and analyses whether it rang true. It didn't.
There are reflections on plotless novels (Solar Bones, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing), on how inspiration might come from a photograph, a glance— learning how artists actually work.
Some essays feel like elegies: Rosa, who died young; the historians; lost houses like 15 Usher’s Island; Eileen Gray and the loss of her childhood home.
What stands out most is how generous, curious, and alive the thinking is. This isn’t just literary criticism — it’s cultural memory, autobiography, intellectual wandering, and a testament to what it means to write, read, remember, and notice. The Irish Times called it a cornucopia, and that feels right.
Similar to Annie Ernaux the Years.
March 2, 2026
Like many of Colm Tóibín's books (including some of his novels) it made me want to search for many of the works he talks about. A lovely book to dip int0 and learn from. I highly ecommend it.
March 8, 2026
I liked this book. Some of our paths have nearly crossed. I missed the book signing in the New Ross bookshop Hubb 16 on South Street, on the 14th November where I obtained a signed copy. Should you wish to know what that is like, he signs CT like a doctor writing a prescription for a CT scan. I have written about the Eniscorthy Library upstairs, where his portrait dominated a room, and have another book on Colm's writing written by academics.
In this book, I enjoyed the story set on the streets of Wexford where two peoples path cross, they meet, and end up being life partners. Opening with Ship in Full Sail he relates an invitation from Tim Robinson to Roundstone, a person I met in Derryclare Wood in 1998 on a Connemara fieldtrip, related in his Last Pool of Darkness novel. I also missed a book signing of Seamus O Rourke of Leitrim and sent him a letter in the theatre in New Ross on the bacteriology of Mars.
This anthology of Colm grew from a blog series for the Laureate of Irish Fiction of 2022. The discipline of writing a blog and harnessing it almost unedited subsequently gives a tour de force of his method and the themes that interest him.
I commend this book to writers, in particular, to show, with persisence and method, one can get there with ones writing via the blogging of installments. Anecdotes of meeting people are interesting, as he gives the divergence of his own mindset from that of his subjects, in the case of Salman Rushdie. He also writes of a Bob Dylan concert, and my only Dylan Album was a tape with the long playing song Brownsville Girl.
So to finish this piece, may I draw your mind to rest, imaging the red shed, a west Wexford reference, in poetry anthologies and song, and the music that might have played there, across from the Beauty of Bath apple tree, that Val Lyng threw into the drink, over eighty years ago, which will now feeds racquetball pioneers playing in the Handball Alley.
In this book, I enjoyed the story set on the streets of Wexford where two peoples path cross, they meet, and end up being life partners. Opening with Ship in Full Sail he relates an invitation from Tim Robinson to Roundstone, a person I met in Derryclare Wood in 1998 on a Connemara fieldtrip, related in his Last Pool of Darkness novel. I also missed a book signing of Seamus O Rourke of Leitrim and sent him a letter in the theatre in New Ross on the bacteriology of Mars.
This anthology of Colm grew from a blog series for the Laureate of Irish Fiction of 2022. The discipline of writing a blog and harnessing it almost unedited subsequently gives a tour de force of his method and the themes that interest him.
I commend this book to writers, in particular, to show, with persisence and method, one can get there with ones writing via the blogging of installments. Anecdotes of meeting people are interesting, as he gives the divergence of his own mindset from that of his subjects, in the case of Salman Rushdie. He also writes of a Bob Dylan concert, and my only Dylan Album was a tape with the long playing song Brownsville Girl.
So to finish this piece, may I draw your mind to rest, imaging the red shed, a west Wexford reference, in poetry anthologies and song, and the music that might have played there, across from the Beauty of Bath apple tree, that Val Lyng threw into the drink, over eighty years ago, which will now feeds racquetball pioneers playing in the Handball Alley.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews