Brandon Taylor has made quite a splash with his debut novel Real Life. Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, a New York Times Editors’ choice, a Guardian summer reading choice plus attracting a whole host of fans including Daisy Johnson, Roxanne Gay, Garth Greenwell and prizewinning writer Colm Tóibín, who will join Brandon to discuss his breath-taking campus novel about solitude and society, sexuality and race.    

Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Literary Hub. His writing has earned him fellowships from Lambda Literary Foundation, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction. 

Colm Tóibín (chair) is an Irish novelist, poet and critic, whose work has achieved numerous literary awards and been nominated multiple times for the Booker Prize. After making his name in Irish journalism in the 1980s, Tóibín produced his debut novel, The South, in 1990, which was awarded the Whitbread First Novel Award. Subsequent works, such as The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, have dwelt upon Tóibín’s Irish heritage. As well as exploring issues of Irish history and cultural identity, Tóibín’s work frequently examines homosexual love and gay lifestyles, either in contemporary society or period novels.