Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and literary historian who writes in English.
Born in Dublin on October 24, 1969, Donoghue pursued her education first at University College Dublin and subsequently at the University of Cambridge, where she studied at Girton College. This academic formation in literature and history grounded her in the scholarly dimensions of writing that would continue alongside her creative output throughout her career.
Donoghue holds both Irish and Canadian citizenship, a dual national identity that reflects the arc of her professional life across two continents. Working across multiple forms — fiction, drama, film, and literary history — she has produced a body of work in English that spans several decades. Her screenwriting credits extend to film, demonstrating a range of craft that moves between the page and the screen. This versatility across genres and formats has been a consistent feature of her working practice.
Her work has been recognized by a number of literary awards. She received the Stonewall Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the Ferro-Grumley Award, three honors associated with LGBTQ literature. She also received the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, one of Canada's prominent literary prizes, and the AWB Vincent Literary Award. Taken together, these recognitions reflect both the geographic range of her readership and the recurring presence of LGBTQ themes across her fiction. The Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction in particular identifies a strand of subject matter that surfaces repeatedly in her novels and other written work.
Across her career as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and literary historian, Donoghue has worked consistently within and across the intersecting fields of literary fiction and LGBTQ narrative. The breadth of her formal training — from University College Dublin to Cambridge's Girton College — is matched by the breadth of her output, which encompasses stage, screen, and the novel. The Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, awarded for fiction in Canada, stands as one of the concrete markers of her standing within the literary culture of her adopted country.
Quotes by Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue's insights on:
I come out of an academic background, and I'm aware that what I'm doing is simultaneously research and fiction. I want to meet both those obligations.
Kids delight in 'magical thinking', whether in the form of the Tooth Fairy or the saints: whether you see these as comforting lies or eternal verities, they are part of how we help kids make sense of the world.
I would say I have sort of a natural gift for character, and following one person's point of view at a time, and dialogue, but I'm not naturally good at strong plot.
The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.
Ah yes, the paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.
You're meant to have an unhappy childhood to be a writer, but there's a lot to be said for a very happy one that just lets you get on with it.
I'm really not one of these procrastinators who cleans the house in order to put off writing, but life gets in the way.
Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.