Tóibín wins Rathbones Folio Prize 2022 for The Magician

Irish novelist Colm Tóibín has won the Rathbones Folio Prize for his “haunting” novel The Magician (Viking), which was mostly written following the author’s cancer diagnosis.

Chair of the judges Tessa Hadley made the announcement as part of the prize ceremony, held on 22nd March at the British Library.

It was the first time Tóibín won the £30,000 prize. He was shortlisted in 2015 for his novel Nora Webster (Penguin). 

The Magician traces the life of author, essayist, philanthropist and social critic Thomas Mann, one of the most acclaimed and contradictory figures in continental European literature. 

Tóibín was four chapters into writing the book when he was diagnosed with cancer. Six months of heavy-duty chemotherapy followed. He told the Rathbones Folio Prize in an interview: “I knew that if the cancer came back, the chances of writing the book were zero. Once I could really start working again, I worked really hard and really fast. Anyway, I finished it.”

The judges said: “Choosing one winner from the eight titles shortlisted found us pulled in so many different directions by these extraordinary books, which we lived with and loved and read and read again. We sat around a table for several hours picking out lines and passages, taking in the very different worlds of each book and arguing passionately for every one of them. 

“And then gradually it became clear–and was a surprise to all of us–that we’d each arrived at the same decision. Colm Tóibín’s The Magician is such a capacious, generous, ambitious novel, taking in a great sweep of 20th-century history, yet rooted in the intimate detail of one man’s private life.”

In his acceptance speech Tóibín said: “I’m extremely grateful to Mary Mount, my editor at Penguin, for the work she put into this book, for the calm and deliberate way she handled something that wasn’t itself calm or deliberate. I also want to thank Katherine Stroud, my publicist, and Peter Straus, my agent, who oversaw all this and the attempt to finish this book. I’m extremely grateful to the judges for this. This matters, because it’s a writer’s prize, the Rathbone Folio Prize, it’s not just given to writers but it’s decided by writers and obviously that means a great deal to me.”

The judges, author of Free Love (Jonathan Cape) Tessa Hadley; William Atkins, whose first book, The Moor (Faber & Faber), was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize; and Rachel Long, poet and founder of Octavia Poetry Collective for Women of Colour, chose The Magician from a shortlist that included Booker Prize-winner The Promise  by Damon Galgut (Chatto & Windus). 

Also shortlisted was Natasha Brown for her debut, Assembly (Hamish Hamilton), Selima Hill for Men Who Feed Pigeons (Bloodaxe Books), Philip Hoare for Albert and the Whale (Fourth Estate), Claire Keegan for Small Things Like These (Faber & Faber), Gwendoline Riley with My Phantoms (Granta), and Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room (Harvill Secker). 

Previous winners of the prize, governed by the Folio Academy, include Carmen Maria Machado in 2021, Valeria Luiselli in 2020, and Raymond Antrobus in 2019.