In Ship in Full Sail Colm Tóibín’s ‘Laureate Lectures’ bookend thirty-four crystal clear essays, one written each month in the course of his tenure as Laureate of Irish Fiction. The myriad topics they embrace include Artificial Intelligence, reading Ulysses, the discomfort of Salman Rushdie in the wilds of County Dublin, Bob Dylan in concert, a life of Thom Gunn and the author’s role in a campaign to save the House of The Dead.
The lectures themselves ruminate on abiding interests — traditional Irish music and the visual arts. Ship in Full Sail — a veritable cornucopia — offers unmatched insights into the range of thinking and ways of working of one of Ireland’s belovèd writers.
'Throughout Ship in Full Sail there is a sense of a writer who continually surrenders to an intense and vital curiosity about the worlds he has experienced and the worlds he has invented. When Tóibín touches on political and social matters he is animated by a seriousness that resists the moral high tone of the goodly and the godly but is sustained throughout by an unwavering belief that what writers must always do is to hold cant to account.' — Michael Cronin, The Irish Times
Additional information
| Weight | N/A |
|---|---|
| Choose Type | Hardback, Paperback |
Preview
Reviews
Tóibín was laureate for Irish fiction from 2022 to 2024, and Ship in Full Sail is a collection of his laureate lectures and of pieces published in his monthly blog on the laureate website.
The range of Tóibín’s enthusiasms is heady. He writes with equal passion about Maighréad Ní Dhomhnaill’s singing and about discovering the disruptive genius of Beethoven’s string quartets. He ponders the narrative possibilities of census returns alongside the need for an intellectual history of the anti-Treaty forces in the Irish Civil War.
The relentlessly comparative turn of his mind means that he is quick to rescue a response to a cultural event from the redundancy of the news cycle. Writing about Colm Bairéad’s An Cailín Ciúin, for example, Tóibín not only draws onFoster, the Claire Keegan text which provided the inspiration for the film, but also discusses Stone in a Landslide by the Catalan novelist Maria Barbal and The Swan by the Icelandic writer Guðbergur Bergsson. Comparing the rural spaces of Ireland, Catalonia, and Iceland in these works allows him to explore ideas around shared landscapes and the integration of loss.
An abiding journalistic concern for precision makes the prose persuasive but uncluttered. Tóibín scrupulously avoids the mandarin mannerisms that can too often take down the informed critic. He is wryly alert to the goofiness that can result from an excess of cultural fervour. In a letter to his mother from the spring of 1974 he makes the candid confession: “Mother, I wish I could stop making an eejit of myself” before going on to tell the story of being at a student party, approaching the singer Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill and asking her to sing An Cailín Rua on the spot.
Keen readers of Tóibín’s fictional work will find interesting insights into the genesis of many of his most important works, such as the sight of Justice Declan Costello in full regalia in 1983 in the Four Courts preceded by a tipstaff providing the inspiration for The Heather Blazing.
Throughout Ship in Full Sail there is a sense of a writer who continually surrenders to an intense and vital curiosity about the worlds he has experienced and the worlds he has invented. When Tóibín touches on political and social matters he is animated by a seriousness that resists the moral high tone of the goodly and the godly but is sustained throughout by an unwavering belief that what writers must always do is to hold cant to account.
— Michael Cronin, The Irish Times
Book Information
Publication date: 4 September 2025
Details: 272pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91737 112 4
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91737 113 1
Cover:‘Mung’ (1981) by Mary Farl Powers, etching, 49 x 39cm from the collection of the Arts Council/An Comhairle Ealaíon by kind permission of the Artist’s Estate c/o Jane Powers
Customer Satisfaction
Customer Service
We’re happy to help. Send your queries to books@gallerypress.com
Shipping
Secure Checkout
Fast, encrypted and secure payments for a worry-free checkout.