by Liam Harte and Michael Parker (London: Macmillan, and New York: St Martin's, 2000), pp.145-167. They have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, RTE and CBC. Judy Stoffman, Writer has a Deft Touch with Sexual Identities, Maureen E. Mulvihill, Emma Donoghue, in. . Rachel Wingfield, 'Lesbian Writers in the Mainstream: Sarah Maitland, Jeanette Winterson and Emma Donoghue' in Beyond Sex and Romance: The Politics of Contemporary Lesbian Fiction, ed. Rachel Epstein (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2009), A Free Space, in From Newman to New Woman: UCD Women Remember, ed. After years of moving between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 Emma Donoghue settled in London, Ontario, where she lives with Chris Roulston and their son Finn (7) and daughter Una (3). 'Emma Donoghue, in conversation with Abby Palko,' 17 July 2017, http://breac.nd.edu/articles/emma-donoghue-in-conversation-with-abby-palko/ A probing interview about my entire career. A lot of people made out I was writing this sinister, money-making book to exploit the grief of victims. David Clare, Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase, The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716-2016, Volume 2 (1992-2016) (Liverpool University Press, 2021). Do you enjoy writing? The Wonder (adapted from my novel with Sebastin Lelio and Alice Birch) followed in 2022. I find my new home, Canada, a more diverse and just society than any other Ive known, so Im glad to have washed up here. - Barry Pierce, The Irish Times. The best book I know about being a battered wife is Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. Join IrishCentrals Book Club on Facebook and enjoy our book-loving community. Donoghue has two children Finn, now six, and Una, three with her female partner Chris Roulston, a professor of women's studies at the University of Western Ontario. In the run-up to publication, however, word was that Donoghue's seventh novel would be based on the modern-day case of Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter, Elisabeth, in a basement for 24 years, raped her repeatedly and fathered her seven children three of whom he imprisoned with her. Write a lot, write with passion. The Pull of the Stars was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Canadian fiction. An international bestseller, Room was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prize, and won the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Prize (Canada & Carribbean Region), the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Awards (Fiction Book and Author of the Year), the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award and the W.H. And the research. [1][5][6] 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. Stir-fry was shortlisted for the 1996 Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction. Sorry, I've no idea. There are all sorts of historical continuities in life, but the past is always strange. [36][37] Hephzibah Anderson, in The Guardian, wrote that "While Haven certainly isnt her most accessible novel, a flinty kind of hope brightens its satisfying ending. Stacia Bensyl, Swings and Roundabouts: An Interview with Emma Donoghue, Irish Studies Review, 8, No. Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 81-92. The Sealed Letter (US/Canada 2008, UK 2011) is a domestic thriller about an 1860s cause celebre (the Codrington Divorce), joint winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. 1 (2000), 73-81. My one-act comedy Dont Die Wondering (based on my radio play of the same name) received its world premiere at the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival in 2005. [32] Alex Preston in The Guardian called it "dispiriting". It makes people care about books, starts an international debate about what people are looking for in the novel. How you can learn Gaelic literature and culture online with a top Irish university, Cork pub that once barred Colin Farrell now warmly welcomes him, WATCH: An old Irish blessing for love and laughter. I knew the chills would be justified. Emma Donoghue's new novel draws on her experience of being a mother. I began my career with Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (UK 1993, US 1996), and followed it up with We Are Michael Field (1998, a biography of a pair of Victorian women writers). Ideally Id want British newspapers, the weather of the south of France, American television and the polite manners of Canada. Emma Donoghue has a gift for taking details from the past and creating believable and absorbing worlds around them.' David Clare, Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase, Ellen McWilliams, 'Transatlantic Encounters in the Writing of Emma Donoghue', in her, Ciaran O'Neill, ' The cage of my moment: a conversation with Emma Donoghue about history and fiction,', Michael Lackey, Ireland, the Irish, and Biofiction, in, Michael Lackey, Emma Donoghue: Voicing the Nobodies in the Biographical Novel, in. Kissing the Witch (1997), my sequence of re-imagined fairytales, was published for adults in the UK but for YA readers in the US and was shortlisted for the James L. Tiptree Award. . Kommentare deaktiviert . -, 'Donoghue [is] a cultural historian of no minor stature. Room wonthe 2010 Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize, the 2011 Commonwealth Prize for Fiction (Canada & Carribbean),W. H. Smith Paperback of the Year (Galaxy National Book Awards), theForest of Reading Evergreen Award, twoLibris Awards from the Canadian Booksellers Association (Fiction Book and Author of the Year, and two awards from the AmericanLibrary Association (Indie Choice Award for Adult Fiction and anAlex Award for an adult book with special appeal to teen readers). What advice would you give a beginner who wants to get published? They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. 'Her own mother raised a family of eight', https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7479147/EMMA-DONOGHUE-recalls-joyous-1950s-diaries-family-life-taught-mother.html, http://www.macleans.ca/culture/emma-donoghue-my-curiosity-flares-up-when-i-hear-about, http://harpers.org/archive/2015/08/the-donor/, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMDwRWGAjxU, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/23/emma-donoghue-mummy-wars-parenting, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/05/once-upon-life-emma-donoghue, https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/8774/, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature, http://historicalfictionsjournal.org/pdf/JHF%202019-126.pdf, http://breac.nd.edu/articles/emma-donoghue-in-conversation-with-abby-palko/, http://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/schedule-for-thursday-december-8-2016-1.3885126/, emma-donoghue-s-musical-tribute-to-dublin-ireland-1.3885485, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/34624902.pdf, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEpFiYSRGuw, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/24/emma-donoghue-the-how-i-write-interview.html, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2012.639177. An exclusive extract from Emma . And going out in public in clean clothes to give readings or interviews too. Even at the micro level, if you drink the last of the coffee in the pot and she wants some. Was it because of its conservatism / homophobia / the Catholic Church? "Room," she says, with the sort of starry grin you'd expect from someone who had just been told they'd won the thing, "has already been denounced on the Booker talkboards. She is serious, wise and funny. (And since publishing. It was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011,[23] but lost out to Tea Obreht. What the reader is likely to take away, however, is the image of a bleak place made still bleaker by human intervention". [20], On 27 July 2010, Donoghue's novel Room was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and on 7 September 2010 it made the shortlist. ", She is keen, too, to contextualise the link between her novel and the Fritzl case. I attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one eye-opening year in New York at the age of ten. Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, I am the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic). No, what lured me to England was funding: full support (from the British Academy and the University of Cambridge) for the first three years of a PhD, which in the event turned into an eight-year stay. No one country can satisfy me now. The protagonist is Emily Faithfull. by Anne Macdona (Dublin: New Island, 2001), 'Proving It,' Siren (Toronto), October 1998, 'The Youngest Child,' Womens News (Belfast), November 1997, 'A Pagan Place,' Gay Community News (Ireland), February 1996, Coming Out a Bit Strong, Index on Censorship, 24, No. Alexander G. Gonzales (Westwood, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2006), 98-101. Throughout August, we'll be reading "The Pull of the Stars by Irish author Emma Donoghue. of 1 The audiobook of Akin, read by Jason Culp, won an AudioFile Earphones Award. At Cambridge, she met her future life partner Christine Roulston, a Canadian, who is now professor of French and Women's Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Perhaps all my bad luck is round the corner. About Emma Donoghue In her own words, Emma writes: "Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, I am the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic). - Irish Times, 'Donoghue's literary repertoire seems to know no bounds' - Ireland Live, 'Few writers boomerang between genres and time periods as nimbly' - Reader's Digest (2020), 'Happily able to reinvent herself with everything she writes. I wrote poetry constantly from early childhood. (And since publishing Room, Im mostly known as the locked-up-children writer instead). Donoghue is visibly thrilled, too, by her place on the longlist. We go to Ireland, England and France a lot too. - Seattle Times (2014), Donoghue is so gifted at depicting the fraught blessing of motherhood. Chicago Tribune (2014), Can inhabit any kind of fictional character and draw us into even the most unfamiliar world with her deep empathy and boundary-defying imagination. - Newsday (2012), Donoghue is one of those rare writers who seems to be able to work on any register, any tone, any atmosphere, and make it her own. Observer (2007), Her touch is so light and exuberantly inventive, her insight at once so forensic and intimate, her people so ordinary even in their oddities. Guardian (2007), A mind that can excavate characters and lives far, far beyond her own front fence. Globe and Mail (2007), Donoghue has the born storytellers knack for sketching a personality and pulling readers into a plot in just a few pages All-encompassing talent. Kirkus (2006), Emma Donoghue is distinguished by her generous sympathy for her characters, sinuous prose and an imaginative range that may soon rival that of A.S. Byatt or Margaret Atwood Has an extraordinary talent for turning exhaustive research into plausible characters and narratives; she presents a vibrant world seething with repressed feeling and class tensions. Publishers Weekly (2004), Her informed imaginings combined with her sheer cleverness and elegance as a writer breathe vivid life into real characters who heretofore resided in the footnotes of history. Irish Times (2002), Every now and again, a writer comes along with a fully loaded brain and a nature so fanciful that she simply must spin out truly original and transporting stuff Eccentric, untethered genius. Seattle Times (2002). Emma Donoghue wonthe 2016 AWB Vincent American Ireland Funds Literary Award, and the 2011 National Lesbian and Gay Federation (Ireland) Person of the Year Award. You want it to matter.". Ontario, where she lives with her partner Chris Roulston and their son Finn (15) and . Emma Donoghue knew she was courting trouble when she set about writing a novel inspired by the notorious case of Austrian monster Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his own daughter in a basement. Just a few books that have stunned me in recent years: Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Travellers Wife; Ronald Wright, A Scientific Romance; Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin; Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle. Male-female friendship in the works and lives of some mid-eighteenth-century English novelists (Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Henry Fielding). All rights reserved. My new novel [Donoghues first since 2010s Room] is about a little girl in Ireland in the 1850s who doesnt eat, before anorexia was identified. When I meet Donoghue, halfway through a publication tour that has mushroomed thanks to her longlisting, she recalls the period as "quite painful. Works A superb analysis of my story cycles as historiographic metafiction. Living with his Ma in an 11ft x 11ft shed, knowing nothing of the outside world beyond the fantasies of the television screen, Jack is a warped version of Maurice Sendak's Max, from Where The Wild Things Are: a boy for whom "the walls became the world all around". Convocation speech (a life in limericks), Western University, 17 June 2013. a giant of letters.' I dont see how my friends can do anything other than hate me. [32], Donoghue's novel The Pull of the Stars (2020), written in 2018-2019, was published earlier than originally planned because it was set in the 1918 influenza pandemic in Dublin, Ireland. "I've always thought of myself as a huge success!". S. Dez, "Women's Homoerotic Voice in the Works of Emma Donoghue: Discovery and Assertion", paper delivered at IASIL (1999). Inspired by about fifty cases of 'fasting girls' over the centuries, The Wonder (2016, a finalist for Canada's Giller Prize and Ireland's Kerry Group Novel of the Year) is about an English nurse sent to the Irish Midlands in 1859 to watch a little girl whose parents claim is living without food. The range of topics . Editorial Reviews 'This is the smart, timely, interdisciplinary book that Anne Lister deserves. Donoghue's latest book, Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature . Favourite Canadians include Helen Humphreys, Annemarie Macdonald, Alice Munro and the late great Carol Shields. I have a large L-shaped desk I keep piled with miscellanea (orange peels, small socks, papers to be filed some year when Ive nothing more interesting to do). - Calgary Herald, 'Donoghue often writes about outsiders combine[s] older-world settings with stories that have an eerie resonance for contemporary society. Passions Between Women was shortlisted for the 1997 Lambda Award for Lesbian Non-Fiction. In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Renee Fox (University of California, Santa Cruz), "Queering the Archive in Emma Donoghue's Neo-historical Fiction," paper delivered MLA 2017 (Philadelphia). Ireland, and Canada, she settled in London, Ontario, where she lives with her partner Chris Roulston and their son and daughter. Stacia Bensyl, Swings and Roundabouts: An Interview with Emma Donoghue, Rachel Wingfield, 'Lesbian Writers in the Mainstream: Sarah Maitland, Jeanette Winterson and Emma Donoghue' in, 'Family Ties: Frances Donoghue on her daughter, Emma Donoghue,', 'Relative Values: Emma Donoghue, lesbian novelist and playwright, and her father, Denis, academic and critic,'. A probing interview about my entire career. Slammerkin won the 2002 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. It's a very healthy discipline', "Future Perfect: Talking With Irish Lesbian Author Emma Donoghue", "The Writers' Trust of Canada - Prize History", "Emma Donoghue, Kathleen Winter make GG short list", "The Scotiabank Giller Prize Presents Its 2016 Shortlist - Scotiabank Giller Prize", "Netflix film based on Dublin writer Emma Donoghue's novel to be made in Ireland", "Florence Pugh has arrived in Ireland, immediately praises Wicklow and Guinness", "Akin by Emma Donoghue review Room author loses her spark", "Thomas King, Emma Donoghue make the 2020 Giller Longlist in a year marked by firsts", "Haven by Emma Donoghue review religious zeal meets ecological warning in AD600 Ireland", "Haven by Emma Donoghue review a seventh-century Room", "12 Canadian books coming out in July we can't wait to read", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Emma_Donoghue&oldid=1151228072, Novelist, short story writer, playwright, literary historian, "Visiting Hours" (2011), based on her radio play "The Modern Family", "Urban Myths" (2012), based on her homonymous radio play, "Humans and Other Animals" (2003), radio play, "Out of Order: Kate O'Brien's Lesbian Fictions" in, "Noises from Woodsheds: The Muffled Voices of Irish Lesbian Fiction" in, "Liberty in Chains: The Diaries of Anne Lister (1817-24)" in, "Divided Heart, Divided History: Eighteenth-Century Bisexual Heroines" in, "How Could I Fear and Hold Thee by the Hand? Show More. When I was in my teens I was reading (to pluck out a few random names) Frank OConnor and Edna OBrien, but also Tolstoy and Raymond Carver, Margaret Atwood and Barbara Vine. Late eighteenth-century London, England. I lived in Ireland until Iwas 20, then England for eight years, then Canada. Camille Harrigan (Concordia), "Reconciling Irishness and Queerness for the New Ireland: Emma Donoghues Early Work and the Voices of Others," paper delivered SOFEIR conference UNHEARD VOICES (Paris), March 2015. How did you become a full-time writer? And Astray (2012, shortlisted for the Eason Irish Novel of the Year) is a sequence of fourteen fact-inspired stories about travels to, from and within North America; one of them, The Hunt, was a finalist in the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Prize. Some American writers I love are Alison Bechdel, Rebecca Brown, Michael Cunningham, Dave Eggers, Elizabeth George, Allan Gurganus, Barbara Kingsolver, Armistead Maupin, E. Annie Proulx, Ann Patchett, Anita Shreve, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler and David Foster Wallace (R.I.P.). Touchy Subjects was longlisted for the 2006 Frank OConnor International Short Story Award. This way I get to eat more cake. It was included in the National Board of Review Top Ten Independent Films. - Maureen Corrigan, NPR, "Its modern parallels do trigger uneasiness (as do its numerous and gloriously explosive birth scenes) but those parallels are what ultimately make The Pull of the Stars a felicitous comment on our new times." Donoghue later wrote the screenplay for a film version of the book, Room (2015), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA Award,[24] and in 2017 adapted it into a play performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.[25]. I was on a panel once with a writer who claimed that we do our best writing unconsciously, in our sleep, and I could just imagine how a dynamo like Charles Dickens would have howled with laughter at that one. The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories [reissued 2013 as Love Alters]was shortlisted for the 2000 Lambda Award for Lesbian Anthology. In her own words, Emma writes: "Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, I am the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic). Piece about birth of a first child in The Day that Changed My Life: Inspirational Stories from Irish Women, ed. After several years of commuting between England, Ireland and Canada, I finally settled in the latter in 1998. A red-haired, blue-eyed Irishwoman, except taller than most, usually wearing bright colours to make up for the pale face. At 21, I found a literary agent, Caroline Davidson, who believed I had a future (that was the real stroke of luck); when I was 23, she got me a two-novel deal with Penguin, which was probably the most gleeful day of my life. Emma Donoghue (born 24 October 1969) is an Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. by Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast (Detroit: St James Press, 1998). Our front room. -. If youre successfully distracted by writing you dont even notice the kilometres. Emma Donoghue: Ive ended up having a family as well as being a lesbian. I am religious, but it is the most embarrassing subject to talk about in detail. [12], Donoghue's first novel was 1994's Stir Fry, a contemporary coming of age novel about a young Irish woman discovering her sexuality. Directed by Sebastin Lelio, the screenplay is by Donoghue and Alice Birch, with Florence Pugh in the leading role. Astray was shortlisted for the 2012 Eason Irish Novel of the Year, as well as the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and'The Hunt', one of its stories, was shortlisted for the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. 1969, in Anthony Roche, ed. Inspired by about fifty cases of 'fasting girls' over the centuries. Touchy Subjects (2006) is a set of nineteen contemporary stories about social taboos that moves between Ireland, Britain, France, Italy, the US and Canada.
