Tóibin takes top teaching job

Irish novelist Colm Tóibin has been appointed professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester.

He will replace well-known British author Martin Amis who is moving to New York.

Mr Amis was appointed to the role in 2007, a move that resulted in uproar when it became known he had been given a £80,000 (€92,000) salary. According to reports, Tóibin will be earning less than his predecessor.

Tóibin will teach postgraduate students for two days a week at the university for one semester a year. He will also take part in four public events.

Among the courses Tóibin will run are a fiction workshop for Master students and a new course called Arts for Writers, in which he will bring composers and artists into the seminar room to explore how music art and theatre influences writing.

Tóibin currently teaches at Princeton University in New Jersey. Born in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, in 1955, he was awarded the Dublin Impac Prize for  The Master  in 2004. His sixth novel  Brooklyn  won the Costa Novel of the Year in 2009.

Mr Tóibin, who has just published a new short story collection entitled  The Empty Family, said he was looking forward to starting in Manchester in September.

“I visited the centre for a reading two years ago, and I saw and liked how the students combined writing new work with reading and talking about literature, in seminars and workshops and in the public events which bring the work out of the university and into contact with the wider world,” he said.

John McAuliffe, co-director of the Centre for New Writing at Manchester University, welcomed the appointment of Tóibin, describing him as "a great writer and a public intellectual".