Emma Donoghue

Born in Dublin, Emma Donoghue studied English and French at Universtiy College Dublin and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1997. She lives in London, Ontario and works as a full-time writer. Although Donoghue has written plays for the stage, screen and radio, she is best known for her fiction. Her works include two contemporary Dublin novels, Stirfry (1994) and Hood (1995), a sequence of re-imagined fairytales called Kissing the Witch (1997); a historical novel inspired by an eighteenth-century murder, Slammerkin (2000); a sequence of historical short stories, The Woman who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002); and Life Mask (2004), the startling true story of a scandalous love triangle in 1790s London. Her latest books are Touchy Subjects (2006), a set of nineteen stories about social taboos that moves between contemporary Ireland, Britain, France, Italy, the US and Canada, and Landing (2007), her first contemporary novel in a decade. Awards include the 1997 American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Book Award for Hood and the 2002 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction for Slammerkin. Her tenth novel, Room, was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and won the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award. Fintan O'Toole of The Irish Times named it one of the best Irish works of fiction in 2010.