Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an award-winning novelist, playwright and screenwriter, living in Canada with her family.

 

Her novel The Pull of the Stars became a bestseller in the U.S. (New York Times), Canada, Ireland and Britain on publication in July 2020. Set in Dublin during the Great Flu pandemic in 1918, it is about a nurse midwife, a doctor and a volunteer helper living through three days in a maternity quarantine ward.

 

A bestseller in Canada and Ireland, Akin (2019) is her first contemporary novel for adults since Room. It follows a retired chemistry professor and his eleven-year-old great-nephew from New York on their journey to the French Riviera to unearth his mother's wartime secrets.

 

Her novel Room was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes and has sold over two million copies. She adapted it into her first feature film, Room, directed by Lenny Abrahamson, which was nominated for four Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Actress (won by Brie Larson who starred). 

 

Her other books are the historical novels The Wonder, Frog Music, The Sealed Letter, Life Mask, Slammerkin, and contemporary ones Landing, Hood and Stir-fry; two family stories for younger readers illustrated by Caroline Hadilaksono, The Lotterys Plus One and The Lotterys More Or Less; short-story collections Astray, Three and a Half Deaths (UK ebook), Touchy Subjects, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, and Kissing the Witch. 

 

She has also published literary history including Inseparable, We Are Michael Field, and Passions Between Women, as well as two anthologies that span the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.

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