I write drama for screen, stage and 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. I have a variety of other projects (adaptations of my own and others' works of fiction and memoir, as well as original screenplays) in development film and television.
Emma Donoghue: Selected Plays, containing my first five works for theatre, is available from Oberon Books. In 2017 I adapted my novel Room (2010) into a play with songs (by Cora Bissett and Kathryn Joseph), which premiered at Theatre Royal Stratford East in London before moving to National Theatre of Scotland in Dundee and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Its North American premiere will be in Canada in March 2020. My first play, I Know My Own Heart (1993), was inspired by the decoded diaries of a Regency 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.
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.