Colum McCann

McCann grew up in Dublin, worked as a journalist before quitting at twenty-one to cycle across the United States for over a year, an experience that turned him permanently toward fiction; he later settled in New York and has taught in Hunter College's MFA program for decades.

Let the Great World Spin (2009) interweaves a dozen New Yorkers (a grieving Park Avenue mother, an Irish monk ministering to prostitutes in the Bronx, a young judge) whose disparate lives brush against Philippe Petit's real August 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center's towers; the novel won the National Book Award and became an unofficial elegy for a city later marked by the towers' destruction.

He has continued writing internationally set fiction, including TransAtlantic and Apeirogon, and remains based in New York while retaining Irish citizenship.