Toner Quinn is a writer, musician, publisher, editor and lecturer. Born in Galway and raised in An Cheathrú Rua in Conamara and Bray, Co. Wicklow, he studied music in Waterford and publishing at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

In 2000, he founded The Journal of Music in Ireland (JMI), a magazine of new writing on music. In print for sixty issues and now online, it won the Utne Independent Press Award for arts coverage in the United States in 2010.

As well as editing JMI, Toner regularly writes on Irish music and culture. In 2024, he published a collection of his music essays, titled What Ireland Can Teach the World About Music, described in the Irish Times as ‘A formidable collection… a richly textured, all‑embracing compendium.’

In 2025, he published Count Me Out, a collection of writings by his father, the filmmaker Bob Quinn, and, with Jerry White, The Radical Thinking of Desmond Fennell, a volume of essays by the late writer and public intellectual.

Toner was Project Officer with the government-established Special Committee on the Traditional Arts, which produced the report Towards a Policy for the Traditional Arts in 2004, and he also authored the Arts Council’s Report on the Harping Tradition in Ireland in 2014. 

A fiddle player, he released Live at the Steeple Sessions with Malachy Bourke on the Ergodos label in 2013, and was artist-in-residence at Stiúideo Cuan in Galway in autumn 2025.

Since 2008, he has lectured in publishing and editing on the MA in Literature and Publishing at the University of Galway, and he also teaches music writing and editing at Maynooth University. He is a member of the board of Publishing Ireland.