Irish author Colm Tóibín has won the Rathbones Folio Prize, given annually to an English-language book in any genre, for his novel The Magician.
Tóibín’s book, published in the U.S. last September by Scribner, is a fictionalized portrait of the life of Thomas Mann, the legendary German author of The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the book as “an intriguing view of a writer who well deserves another turn on the literary stage.”
In a statement, the prize’s judges said, “Colm Tóibín’s The Magician is such a capacious, generous, ambitious novel, taking in a great sweep of 20th century history, yet rooted in the intimate detail of one man’s private life.”
Tóibín is one of Ireland’s most celebrated authors. He won the Costa Novel Award in 2009 for Brooklyn, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, for The Blackwater Lightship, The Master, and The Testament of Mary.
Tóibín told the Guardian that it was “gratifying” to win the award.
“It was a difficult book to write,” he said. “Researching it took 15 years, but the task was to make it read as the story of a family in a turbulent time rather than a piece of historical research.”
The Rathbones Folio Prize was established in 2013. Previous winners have included George Saunders for Tenth of December and Carmen Maria Machado for In the Dream House.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
