In his most celebrated book, Dancer, he succeeded in immortalizing with incredible introspection the explosion of talent and eroticism in the life of Rudolf Nureyev; and also the overwhelming passion for art of the great dancer and the anguish of political persecution faced in the Soviet Union. No less passionate is his recent Zoli, an extraordinary portrait of a culture which is proud of its own marginality, and whose protagonist is a Rom woman. Irish by birth, but now a resident in New York, McCann was a candidate for an Oscar for the adaptation of his short story “Everything in this Country Must.”