It’s the birthday of internationally acclaimed writer Colum McCann (b. 1965), author of three story collections and six novels, including the international bestsellers Let the Great World Spin (2009) and Transatlantic (2013).

McCann was born and raised in Ireland, where he started out as a journalist in The Irish Press. He moved to the U.S. in the summer of 1986 and tried writing a novel but failed; his response to this was to bike across the U.S. in search of stories and adventure. He studied at the University of Texas at Austin and with his wife Allison lived in Japan for a year and a half, working at his first story collection and teaching English. In 1994 they moved to New York City, where they still live with their three children.

McCann’s family was living on 71st street on 9/11, and his father-in-law was in one of the towers when it was hit; he walked down 59 floors and then uptown to McCann’s family, where McCann’s young daughter was convinced from the smell on his clothes that he was burning from the inside. Let the Great World Spin was written out of McCann’s struggle to cope with the events of 9/11. The novel, which takes place in the 1970s, opens with the real-life illegal tightrope walk of Philippe Petit between the Twin Towers. This “artistic crime of the century” is witnessed by the disparate New Yorkers below, whose stories and experiences of grief are woven together throughout this soaring, panoramic novel—including the story of the judge in whose court Petit lands (he is arrested as soon as his stunt is over), who himself is grieving over a son killed in Vietnam. The novel won multiple awards internationally, including the National Book Award, and has been called “a kind of corrective to Don DeLillo’s remorselessly precise and punishing Falling Man,” another 9/11 novel (Tom Junod, “Let the Great World Spin: The First Great 9/11 Novel,” July 8, 2009, Esquire). Whatever you’re reading now: drop it, get your hands on a copy of Let the Great World Spin, and dive in.

Several months after the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, McCann spent a day at Newton High School talking with students. Their teacher had chosen McCann’s novel as a way to begin helping them deal with the tragedy. McCann, very active in charity work, is a cofounder of Narrative4, a global organization that brings together young people from different places (say, Northern Ireland and Chicago) to tell each other their stories, then share each *other’s* stories, with the goal of developing a generation of empathetic leaders.

Transatlantic is even more ambitious in scope than Let the Great World Spin, spanning a century and a half to tell the stories of Frederick Douglass, aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown, and Senator George Mitchell in Atlantic crossings that impacted history.

McCann’s latest works include the short story collection Thirteen Ways of Looking (2015) and the novel Apeirogon (2020), just published three days ago, so flaming hot off the press.

Have a fantastic Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.