Fintan O'Toole

Fintan O’Toole examines Irish politics, culture and history through criticism, journalism and books. He writes for The Irish Times and previously taught at Princeton as a visiting lecturer and Visiting Leonard L. Milberg '53 Professor in Irish Letters. The Orwell Foundation awarded him its 2017 Journalism Prize for work published in The Irish Times, The Guardian and The Observer. We Don’t Know Ourselves brings personal memories into a social history of Ireland beginning in 1958, the year of O’Toole’s birth. Rather than presenting a conventional memoir, it traces national change across the span of his life and considers shifts in politics, religion, migration and popular culture. The book won at the An Post Irish Book Awards. O’Toole’s other works include Heroic Failure, Ship of Fools, A Traitor’s Kiss and White Savage, extending his criticism from modern politics to theatre and historical biography.