Colum McCann

Colum McCann was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1965, the son of a newspaper editor. McCann himself became a journalist by the age of 17, quickly thereafter taking on his own newspaper column. When he was 21 he moved from Ireland to the United States, where he planned to write a novel. After an initial failed attempt to do so, however, he decided to ride his bicycle across the country in order to enliven his emotional capacities. Soon after, he found himself in Texas, where he worked as an outdoor leader on wilderness trips for at-risk youth. He went on to graduate from the University of Texas at Austin with degrees in English and history. In the early 1990s McCann moved to New York, where he currently lives with his wife and three children. He has penned six novels and three story collections, won numerous awards, and is known internationally for his literary work as well as for his involvement with charities and nonprofits. Perhaps most notably, he is a co-founder of the global nonprofit Narrative 4, a story-exchange program that seeks to transcend stereotypes and barriers through the use of storytelling and the idea of “radical empathy.”