Fintan O'Toole
Fintan O'Toole is a columnist with The Irish Times and advising editor of the New York Review of Books. He was the Leonard L. Milberg visiting Professor in Irish Letters at Princeton University and has been elected to the Royal Irish Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Philosophical Society . He is the winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism, the European Press Prize and the Robert L. Silvers Prize for Journalism. He is currently working on the official biography of Seamus Heaney.
Born in Dublin in 1958, he has served as drama critic of In Dublin magazine, The Sunday Tribune, the New York Daily News, and The Irish Times and Literary Adviser to the Abbey Theatre. His books on the theatre include studies of Tom Murphy, William Shakespeare, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Bernard Shaw.
His most recent book is For and Against a United Ireland, co-authored with Sam McBride.
Twitter: @fotoole
Books in order of publication:
Meanwhile Back at the Ranch: The Politics of Irish Beef (1995).
Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political (1999).
Tom Murphy: The Politics of Magic (1994).
A Radical Guide to Macbeth & Hamlet (1995).
The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities (1995).
The Ex-Isle of Erin (1997).
A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1751-1816 (1997).
The Irish Times Book of the 1916 Rising (1999).
Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life (2002).
Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre (2003).
After the Ball (2003).
Post Washington: Why America Can’t Rule the World (2005).
White Savage (2005).
Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (2009).
Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic (2010).
Up the Republic!: Towards a New Ireland (2012).
A History of Ireland in 100 Objects (2013).
Judging Shaw (2017).
Heroic Failure (2018).
Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles (2020).
We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (2021).
For and Against a United Ireland (2025).
