About Emma Donoghue

Emma Donoghue

Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, I am the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic, Henry James Professor at New York University).  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 month as a chambermaid. After years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 I settled in London, Ontario, where I live with my lover Chris Roulston and our son Finn (6) and daughter Una (3).

Emma Donoghue

Fiction

Although I work in many genres, I am best known for my fiction.

ROOM (2010), longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is narrated by a five-year-old called Jack, who lives in a single room with his Ma and has never been outside.

I began by writing about contemporary Dublin before the Boom in a coming-of-age novel, STIRFRY (1994), and a tale of bereavement, HOOD (1995, winner of the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Book Award), and I returned to my transformed home city with a love story that contrasts it with smalltown Ontario in LANDING (2007, winner of a Golden Crown Literary Award).

I have a great love for the short story form; my stories have been published in GRANTA, the SUNDAY EXPRESS, MAIL ON SUNDAY, THE LADY, the GLOBE AND MAIL as well as 30 other journals and anthologies.  They have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, RTE and CBC. TOUCHY SUBJECTS (2006) is a set of nineteen stories about social taboos that moves between Ireland, Britain, France, Italy, the US and Canada.

I became a YA author by accident. KISSING THE WITCH (1997), my sequence of re-imagined fairytales, was published for adults in the UK but bought by Joanna Cottler Books (HarperCollins) in the US; they managed to win me a whole new 12-and-up audience, and KISSING THE WITCH was shortlisted for the James L. Tiptree Award. 

Perhaps inevitably, given my scholarly background and bent, I moved into historical fiction with SLAMMERKIN (2000), a whydunnit inspired by a 1763 murder.  Historical fiction was not yet trendy and I thought this dark story would be impossible to sell (and it certainly was difficult), but it became a surprise bestseller.  SLAMMERKIN was a Main Selection of the Book of the Month Club, won the 2002 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction, and was a finalist in the 2001 Irish Times Irish Fiction Prize.  I followed it with a sequence of short stories about real incidents from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, THE WOMAN WHO GAVE BIRTH TO RABBITS (2002), and then LIFE MASK (2004, a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award), which tells the startling true story of a love triangle in 1790s London.  THE SEALED LETTER (2008) is a domestic thriller about an 1860s cause celebre (the Codrington Divorce), and joint winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. I see it as completing a sort of trilogy of investigations of the British class system, from the desperation of poverty in SLAMMERKIN, though the complexities of the genteel in LIFE MASK, to the bourgeois embarrassments of THE SEALED LETTER.

My novels have been translated into Catalan, Chinese (complex and simple characters), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai and Turkish.

Drama

I write drama for the stage and for radio.  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; you can read it in SEEN AND HEARD: SIX NEW PLAYS BY IRISH WOMEN, edited by Cathy Leeney. 

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 and was published by New Island Press in 1998; the first US production was by Outward Spiral Theatre in Minneapolis, 1999 , and productions in San Francisco and Rochester, NY, have followed. My adaptation of my fairy-tale book, KISSING THE WITCH, premiered at San Francisco's Magic Theatre on 9 June 2000 and received its first Canadian production at Buddies in Bad Times in Toronto in March 2002.  My one-act comedy DON’T DIE WONDERING received its world premiere at the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival in 2005.

Radio

My radio plays are (for RTE) TRESPASSES (1996, about a seventeenth-century Irish witch trial) for RTE, 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 (2003) is an hour-long drama about an intersexed girl, for the cutting-edge ‘The Wire’ slot on BBC Radio 3.

Screen

My ten-minute film, PLUCK (2001, directed by Neasa Hardiman), is an urban fairytale about a man’s obsession with a hair on his girlfriend’s chin. In 2007 I set myself the technical challenge of hand-making a 40-minute documentary about me and some of my friends, IMMACULATE CONCEPTIONS: INSIDE A LESBIAN BABY BOOM, which has shown at the London Lesbian Film Festival (London, Ontario), the Austin Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and the GAZE Festival (Dublin).

Literary History

The other hat I wear is that of literary historian; I began my career with the somewhat groundbreaking PASSIONS BETWEEN WOMEN: BRITISH LESBIAN CULTURE 1668-1801 (1993) and followed it up with WE ARE MICHAEL FIELD (1998, a biography of a pair of Victorian women writers).  I have edited two anthologies, WHAT SAPPHO WOULD HAVE SAID (U.S. title POEMS BETWEEN WOMEN, 1997) and THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF LESBIAN SHORT STORIES(1999). In 2010 Knopf and Random House Canada brought out my study of a thousand years of girl-girl plot motifs in Western literature, INSEPARABLE: DESIRE BETWEEN WOMEN IN LITERATURE.

I have also taught creative writing for the Cheltenham Literary Festival and the Arvon Foundation, been a writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario and the University of York, been a judge for the Irish Times Literature Prizes, the co-presenter of a primetime literary series on Irish television (fun, but traumatised by all the eye makeup!), and a shareholder of the National Theatre of Ireland.

I am a member of the Society of Authors, and the Writer’s Union of Canada.

Awards