"A Country of the Elsewheres": An Interview with Colum McCann

Colum McCann grew up in and around Dublin, and spent summers at his mother's family farm in County Derry in Northern Ireland. He has lived in Texas, Europe, and Japan, but has resided in New York for more than fifteen years. McCann is the author of seven books of fiction: Let the Great World Spin (2009), Zoli (2006), Dancer (2003), Everything in This Country Must (2000), This Side of Brightness (1998), Songdogs (1995), and Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1993). He has also written essays and pieces for New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, and GQ. Though Irish characters people many of his works, exiles from all over the world—including the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev—have filled his fiction. Early in his career he won a Pushcart Prize, the Irish Hennessy Award, the Butler Prize, and the Rooney award, and was short-listed for the IMPAC award twice. In 2002, he received the Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award, and in 2003 he won the Hughes and Hughes/Sunday Independent Irish Novel of the Year for Dancer. In 2005 he was inducted into the Hennessy Hall of Fame and had the short film version of "Everything in This Country Must" (he co-wrote the film script) nominated for an Oscar. Most recently, for his novel, Let The Great World Spin, he won the National Book Award in 2009 and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2011, the largest cash prize in the world for a work of literature.

The conversation that follows collates material from a series of interviews over the past decade. With the exception of the closing questions, which were obtained in an e-mail exchange in May, 2012, all of the interviews were conducted in New York City. The opening discussion of his Irish and American identities is taken from our conversation in February 2003. The brief discussion of Everything in This Country Must is abstracted from a much longer interview conducted in September 2007. Most of this interview, however, focuses on Let the Great World Spin, a novel comprising interlinked stories and multiple narrators, but linked by the shared experience of Phillipe Petit's daring, unauthorized high-wire [End Page 98-] walk between the Twin Towers on August 7, 1974. The life of every character somehow dovetails with other characters, and in particular, radiates from a single moment of tragedy and trauma. In life, we rarely see how we connect with strangers, just as none of the characters see all the connections that link their lives with one another. In fiction, such connections can be observed. Let the Great World Spin connects all of the characters, both known and unknown, both witnessed and unnoticed. The novel went on to garner tremendous praise, including the National Book Award in 2010, and the 2011 IMPAC International Literary Book Award. But in September 2008, when I conducted a series of face-to-face interviews with McCann, he had just completed Let the Great World Spin, and was uncertain as to its reception.

Joseph Lennon:

Let me start with a question that's been posed to many of your tribe before you. Are you still an Irish writer?

Colum McCann:

People always want and need to put these things into certain categories. C-SPAN won't put fiction writers on their channel because their rule says no fiction, only nonfiction—what does that mean? Surely the fictions that are spun out by politicians and historians and biographers are just as healthy and unhealthy as those spun out by "fiction writers." So what it comes down to is that very elemental thing of sound and story, which is perhaps an Irish thing.

But I was born in Ireland, I was raised in Ireland. I'm still an Irish writer. I can't really be anything else. I realize that now. I can go write a novel about Brazil or Palestine or Australia or New York, but I'll still come back to the plain fact that I'm an Irish writer. I can't shed that skin. I...