Emma Donoghue (born 24 October 1969) is an Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin (2000) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room was adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Donoghue was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1969. The youngest of eight children, she is the daughter of Frances (born Rutledge) and academic and literary critic Denis Donoghue. She has a first-class honours Bachelor of Arts degree from University College Dublin (in English and French) and a PhD in English from Girton College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge she lived in a women's co-operative, an experience which inspired her short story "The Welcome". Her thesis was on friendship between men and women in 18th-century fiction.
At Cambridge, she met her future wife, Christine Roulston, a Canadian who is now professor of French and Women's Studies at the University of Western Ontario. They moved permanently to Canada in 1998 and Donoghue became a Canadian citizen in 2004. She lives in London, Ontario, with Roulston and their two children.

Return to Emma Donoghue Autograph Profile