Emma Donoghue, an Irish Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter, is born in Dublin on October 24, 1969. Her 2010 novel Room is a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Her 1995 novel Hood wins the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin (2000) wins the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room is adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Donoghue is the youngest of eight children, the daughter of Frances (née Rutledge) and academic and literary critic Denis Donoghue. She has a first-class honours Bachelor of Arts degree from University College Dublin (UCD) in English and French as well as a PhD in English from Girton College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge she lives in a women’s co-operative, an experience which inspires her short story “The Welcome.” Her thesis is on friendship between men and women in 18th-century fiction.

At Cambridge, she meets her future wife, Christine Roulston, a Canadian who is now professor of French and Women’s Studies at the University of Western Ontario. They move permanently to Canada in 1998 and Donoghue becomes a Canadian citizen in 2004. She lives in London, Ontario, with Roulston and their two children.

Donoghue has spoken of the importance of the writing of Emily Dickinson, of Jeanette Winterson‘s novel The Passion and Alan Garner‘s Red Shift in the development of her work. She says that she aims to be “industrious and unpretentious” about the process of writing, and that her working life has changed since having children.

Donoghue’s novels include Stir Fry (1994), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 1994, Slammerkin (2000), a finalist in the 2001 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction and winner of the 2002 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction, Landing (2007), The Sealed Letter (2008), joint winner of the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, Room (2010), winner of the Irish Book Award 2010, Frog Music (2014), The Wonder (2016), shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Akin (2019), The Pull of the Stars (2020), longlisted for the Giller Prize in 2020, and Haven (2022).