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 Emma Donoghue

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Emma Donoghue

Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, I am the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic). I attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one eye-opening year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 I earned a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin (unfortunately, without learning to actually speak French). I moved to England, and in 1997 received my PhD (on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction) from the University of Cambridge. From the age of 23, I have earned my living as a writer, and have been lucky enough to never have an ‘honest job’ since I was sacked after a single summer month as a chambermaid. After years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 I settled in London, Ontario, where I live with Chris Roulston and our son Finn and daughter Una.

Drama

I write drama for screen and stage, and I have also worked in radio.

Room, which I adapted from my novel for the big screen, was my first feature film, and I was shortlisted for an Academy Award, Golden Globe and Bafta for Best Adapted Screenplay. The Wonder (adapted from my novel with Sebastián Lelio and Alice Birch) followed in 2022. I collaborated with director Philippa Lowthorpe on the forthcoming adaptation of Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk.

I adapted my novel Room (2010) into a play with songs (by Cora Bissett and Kathryn Joseph) which had its UK/Irish premiere in 2017 and its North American one in 2022. Emma Donoghue: Selected Plays, containing my first five works for theatre, is available from Bloomsbury.  My first play, I Know My Own Heart (1993), was inspired by the decoded diaries of Yorkshirewoman Anne Lister, and was premiered by Dublin's Glasshouse Productions in 1993. Glasshouse and the Irish Arts Council commissioned me to write Ladies and Gentlemen, a play with songs about vaudeville stars (including two women who got married in 1886), which premiered in 1996. My adaptation of my fairy-tale book, Kissing the Witch, premiered at San Francisco's Magic Theatre in June 2000. My one-act comedy Don’t Die Wondering (based on my radio play of the same name) received its world premiere at the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival in 2005. The Talk of the Town, about the Irish writer Maeve Brennan in New York in the 1950s, premiered at the 2012 Dublin Theatre Festival, directed by Annabelle Comyn in collaboration with HATCH Theatre Company, Landmark Productions and the Dublin Theatre Festival. The Pull of the Stars (2024), which I adapted from my 2020 novel about the 1918 flu pandemic, was commissioned by Gate Theatre Dublin and directed by Louise Lowe.

The Wind Coming Over the Sea, a folk musical about Irish emigrants to Canada in the 1840s, has been commissioned by Blyth Festival and will have its world premiere June-August 2025.

My radio plays are (for RTE) Trespasses (1996, about a seventeenth-century Irish witch trial), and (for BBC Radio 4) Don’t Die Wondering (2000, a romantic comedy set in a small Irish town), Exes (2001, a series of five short plays about getting on with your ex), and Humans and Other Animals (2003, a series of five short plays about pets). Mix (BBC Radio 3, 2003) is an hour-long drama about an intersexed teenager.