科爾姆·托賓（Colm Tóibín），愛爾蘭當代著名作傢。一九五五年齣生於愛爾蘭一個熱衷於愛爾蘭獨立運動的傢庭，畢業於都柏林大學學院。他在二十世紀八十年代曾投身新聞業，曾擔任愛爾蘭新聞月刊《麥吉爾》（Magill）編輯。

自一九九〇年發錶處女作小說《南方》以來，托賓已齣版五部長篇小說、一部短篇小說集、一部戲劇和多部遊記、散文集等非虛構作品，並主編《企鵝版愛爾蘭小說選》。《大師》是他迄今最著名的作品，獲得二〇〇六年IMPAC都柏林國際文學奬。他一九九八年發錶的長篇小說《黑水燈塔船》（The Blackwater Lightship）曾獲英國布剋奬和IMPAC都柏林國際文學奬提名。目前，科爾姆·托賓住在都柏林。

Like Michael Cunningham in "The Hours, " Colm Toibin captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Brilliant and profoundly moving, "The Master" tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America's first intellectual families two decades before the Civil War. James left his country to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers. In stunningly resonant prose, Toibin captures the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man who never married, never resolved his sexual identity, and whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. The emotional intensity of Toibin's portrait of James is riveting. Time and again, James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proves blind to his own heart and incapable of reconciling his dreams of passion with his own fragility. Toibin is "a great and humanizing writer" who describes complex relationships in "supple, beautifully modulated prose" ("The Washington Post Book World"). In "The Master, " he has written his most ambitious and heartbreaking novel, an extraordinarily inventive encounter with a character at the cusp of the modern age, elusive to his own friends and even family, yet astonishingly vivid in these pages.