Fiction
Although I work in many genres, I am best known for my fiction, which has been translated into over forty languages.
My next novel, The Paris Express, is about a French railway disaster of 1895, and comes out in March 2025.
Set in a York boarding school in 1805, Learned by Heart (2023) is the long-buried love story of diarist Anne Lister (inspiration for the BBC/HBO series Gentleman Jack) and Indian orphan heiress Eliza Raine.
Haven (2022) imagines the experience of the first three people to land on Skellig Michael around the year 600.
Written before Covid-19, my 2020 novel The Pull of the Stars was inspired by the centenary of the Great Flu of 1918 and is set in a Dublin hospital where a nurse midwife, a doctor and a volunteer helper fight to save patients in a tiny maternity quarantine ward.
Akin ( 2019) is about a retired New York professor and his eleven-year-old great-nephew going to the French Riviera to unearth the professor's mother's wartime secrets.
My series for middle-grade readers (8 to 12), The Lotterys, includes The Lotterys Plus One (2017) and The Lotterys More Or Less (2018), both illustrated by Caroline Hadilaksono.
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 2022 feature film starring Florence Pugh was co-written by me, director Sebastián Lelio and Alice Birch.
Frog Music (2014) is a literary mystery inspired by a never-solved murder of a crossdressing frog catcher in San Francisco in 1876.
Room (2010) is narrated by a five-year-old called Jack, who lives in a single room with his Ma and has never been outside. 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. Smith Paperback of the Year Award.
I began by writing about contemporary Dublin before the Boom in a coming-of-age novel, Stir-fry (1994), and a tale of bereavement, Hood (1995, winner of the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Book Award, republished by HarperCollins in the US), and I returned to my transformed home city with a love story that contrasts it with smalltown Ontario in Landing (2007, winner of a Golden Crown Literary Award).
My works in the short story form have been published in Granta, the New Statesman, One Story, the Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, The Lady, the Globe and Mail, as well as 30 other journals and anthologies. They have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, RTE and CBC. Touchy Subjects (2006) is a set of nineteen contemporary stories about social taboos that moves between Ireland, Britain, France, Italy, the US and Canada.
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.
I first moved into historical fiction with Slammerkin (2000), a whydunnit inspired by a 1763 murder. Slammerkin was a Main Selection of the Book of the Month Club, won the 2002 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction, and was a finalist in the 2001 Irish Times Irish Fiction Prize.
I followed it with a sequence of short stories about real incidents from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002), and then Life Mask (2004, a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award), which tells the startling true story of a love triangle in 1790s London. 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.
Three and a Half Deaths, my first mini ebook (UK/Ireland only), brings together four stories of calamities ranging from 1840s Canada to 1920s France. 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.
Drama
I write drama for screen and stage, and I have also worked in radio.
Room, which I adapted from my novel for the big screen, was my first feature film, and I was shortlisted for an Academy Award, Golden Globe and Bafta for Best Adapted Screenplay. The Wonder (adapted from my novel with Sebastián Lelio and Alice Birch) followed in 2022. I collaborated with director Philippa Lowthorpe on the forthcoming adaptation of Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk.
I adapted my novel Room (2010) into a play with songs (by Cora Bissett and Kathryn Joseph) which had its UK/Irish premiere in 2017 and its North American one in 2022. Emma Donoghue: Selected Plays, containing my first five works for theatre, is available from Bloomsbury. My first play, I Know My Own Heart (1993), was inspired by the decoded diaries of Yorkshirewoman Anne Lister, and was premiered by Dublin's Glasshouse Productions in 1993. Glasshouse and the Irish Arts Council commissioned me to write Ladies and Gentlemen, a play with songs about vaudeville stars (including two women who got married in 1886), which premiered in 1996. My adaptation of my fairy-tale book, Kissing the Witch, premiered at San Francisco's Magic Theatre in June 2000. My one-act comedy Don’t Die Wondering (based on my radio play of the same name) received its world premiere at the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival in 2005. The Talk of the Town, about the Irish writer Maeve Brennan in New York in the 1950s, premiered at the 2012 Dublin Theatre Festival, directed by Annabelle Comyn in collaboration with HATCH Theatre Company, Landmark Productions and the Dublin Theatre Festival. The Pull of the Stars (2024), which I adapted from my 2020 novel about the 1918 flu pandemic, was commissioned by Gate Theatre Dublin and directed by Louise Lowe.
The Wind Coming Over the Sea, a folk musical about Irish emigrants to Canada in the 1840s, has been commissioned by Blyth Festival and will have its world premiere June-August 2025.
My radio plays are (for RTE) Trespasses (1996, about a seventeenth-century Irish witch trial), and (for BBC Radio 4) Don’t Die Wondering (2000, a romantic comedy set in a small Irish town), Exes (2001, a series of five short plays about getting on with your ex), and Humans and Other Animals (2003, a series of five short plays about pets). Mix (BBC Radio 3, 2003) is an hour-long drama about an intersexed teenager.
Literary History
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). I have edited two anthologies, Poems Between Women: Four Centuries of Love, Romantic Friendship and Desire (UK title What Sappho Would Have Said) (1997) and The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories (1999) as well as publishing a range of scholarly articles. In 2010 Knopf and Random House Canada brought out my study of a thousand years of plot motifs in Western literature, Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature, which won the Stonewall Non-Fiction Award from the American Library Association.
I have also taught creative writing for the Cheltenham Literary Festival and the Arvon Foundation, been a writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario and the University of York (UK), co-presenter of a primetime book series on Irish television, and a judge for the Irish Times Literature Prizes and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award for Fiction.
Awards
The audiobooks of Learned by Heart, The Pull of the Stars, Akin, and Room all won Audiofile Earphones Awards. Astray (the Hachette audiobook) won the 2013 Audie Award for a Multi-Voice Audiobook.
Room, the film directed by Lenny Abrahamson with screenplay by Emma Donoghue, won the Best Actress Academy Award and Golden Globe Best Dramatic Actress (for Brie Larson), the Canadian Screen Award for Best Film, the Irish Film and Television Academy Award for Best Film, the Grolsch People's Choice Award at Toronto International Film Festival, the Hamptons International Film Festival Audience Award for Narrative Feature, the Audience Poll at Warsaw Film Festival, the Cinemex Competencia Award at Los Cabos International Film Festival, the Audience Award at New Orleans Film Fest, the Audience Award at Aspen FilmFest, the Audience Award for Best Narrative (tied with Atom Egoyan's Remember) at Calgary International Film Festival, the Audience Award at Mill Valley Film Festival, Best Canadian Film at Vancouver International Film Festival, the British Independent Film Award for Best International Film, and an American Film Institute top ten award.
Emma Donoghue's script for Room won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the Irish Film and Television Academy Award for Best Screenplay, the Evening Standard Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and the Independent Spirit Award for First Screenplay, as well as the Eda Award for Best Woman Screenwriter, the Austin Film Critics Association Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the Indiana Film Journalists Association Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the San Diego Film Critics Society Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the Online Film & Television Association Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the Nevada Film Critics Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (tied with Drew Goddard for The Martian), the Southeastern Film Critics Association Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the Eda Award for Best Woman Screenwriter, the Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards for Best Canadian Film and Best Screenplay in a Canadian Film, and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Award for Best Screenplay.
Emma Donoghue won the 2016 AWB Vincent American Ireland Funds Literary Award, and the 2011 National Lesbian and Gay Federation (Ireland) Person of the Year Award.
Room won the 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), the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award, two Libris Awards from the Canadian Booksellers’ Association (Fiction Book and Author of the Year, and two awards from the American Library Association (Indie Choice Award for Adult Fiction and an Alex Award for an adult book with special appeal to teen readers). Hachette's multi-voice audiobook of Room won an Audiofile Earphones Award and the 2011 Audie Award for a Multi-Voice Audiobook.
Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature won the 2011 Stonewall Book Awards – Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award (from the American Library Association).
The Sealed Letter was joint winner of the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.
Landing won the 2008 Golden Crown Literary Award (Lesbian Dramatic General Fiction).
Slammerkin won the 2002 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction.
Hood won the 1997 American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Book Award (now known as the Stonewall Book Award).
Shortlisted
Learned by Heart was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for best Canadian fiction.
Haven was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award - the world's most valuable prize for a single work of fiction published in English.
The Wonder, the feature film starring Florence Pugh adapted from her novel by Emma Donoghue, Sebastián Lelio, and Alice Birch, was shortlisted for a Bafta (Outstanding British Film), a Women Film Critics Circle award for Best Screenplay, an EDA Award (Alliance of Women Film Journalists) for Best Adapted Screenplay, the Girls on Film Best Feature Film, six London Film Critics' Circle awards including Best Screenplay and British/Irish Film of the Year, and twelve British Independent Film Awards including Best Screenplay and Best British Independent Film. It was included in the National Board of Review Top Ten Independent Films.
The Pull of the Stars was a finalist for the Easons Irish Novel of the Year, the Trillium Book Award, the Stonewall Book Award Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and a Goodreads Choice Award for historical fiction.
Room, Donoghue's stage adaptation of her novel with songs by Cora Bissett and Kathryn Joseph, was one of three finalists for the Carol Bolt Award for best new Canadian play.
Akin was shortlisted for the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize.
The Wonder was shortlisted for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Award for best Canadian fiction, the Bord Gáis Energy Eason Novel of the Year, and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, as well as a Medici Award for book-club favourite titles and a Shirley Jackson Award for the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.
Donoghue's screenplay for Room was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Adapted Screenplay), a Golden Globe (Drama Screenplay), a Bafta, a USC Scripter Award, a St. Louis Film Critics Association Award, a Seattle Film Critics Award, a San Francisco Film Critics Circle Award, a Phoenix Film Critics Society Award, a North Carolina Film Critics Association Award, a Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award, a Houston Film Critics Society Award, a Georgia FIlm Ctitics Association Award, a Dorian Award from the Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics, an Awards Circuit Community Award, an Eda Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, a Chlotrudis Award, a Chicago Film Critics Association Award, a Central Ohio Film Critics Association Award, a Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Award, a Denver Film Critics Society Award, a Florida Film Critics Circle Award, an Online Film Critics Society Award, two London Critics Circle Awards (Screenwriter and Breakthrough British/Irish Filmmaker), a Critics Choice Award, a Satellite Award and a Zebbie.
Frog Music was one of the Honor Books in Literature chosen in the Stonewall Book Awards 2015, and was a finalist in the Bisexual Book Award for Fiction.
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.
Room was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Trillium English Book Award, and International Author of the Year (Galaxy National Book Awards).
Inseparable was shortlisted for the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Non-Fiction.
Life Mask was shortlisted for the 2005 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction.
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits was shortlisted for the 2003 Stonewall Book Award.
Slammerkin was shortlisted for the 2001 Irish Times Irish Fiction Prize.
The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories [reissued 2013 as Love Alters] was shortlisted for the 2000 Lambda Award for Lesbian Anthology.
Poems Between Women [UK title What Sappho Would Have Said] was shortlisted for the 1999 Lambda Award for Lesbian Anthology.
Kissing the Witch was shortlisted for the 1997 James L. Tiptree Award.
Passions Between Women was shortlisted for the 1997 Lambda Award for Lesbian Non-Fiction.
Stir-fry was shortlisted for the 1996 Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction.
I Know My Own Heart was shortlisted for the 1994 Stewart Parker Award for Best Irish Debut Play.
Longlisted
The Wonder was longlisted for three Baftas, including Adapted Screenplay.
The Pull of the Stars was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Canadian fiction.
Astray was longlisted for the Story Prize, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction.
The Wonder and Room were longlisted for the 2012 International Impac Dublin Literary Award.
The Sealed Letter was longlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Touchy Subjects was longlisted for the 2006 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.
Autobiographical Pieces
Piece about birth of a first child in The Day that Changed My Life: Inspirational Stories from Irish Women, ed. Caitlin McBride (Black and White, 2019).
'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
'Emma Donoghue: My curiosity flares up when I hear about...', Macleans, 5 November 2016, http://www.macleans.ca/culture/emma-donoghue-my-curiosity-flares-up-when-i-hear-about/
The Donor', Harper's Magazine (August 2015), http://harpers.org/archive/2015/08/the-donor/
On how creativity is like sex: http://thewalrus.ca/tv-juices-flowing/
Convocation speech (a life in limericks), Western University, 17 June 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMDwRWGAjxU
'It was a radical way to live' (memories of my Cambridge housing co-op), Sunday Times (Ireland), 19 May 2013
‘I’m sick of all this mutual surveillance – let’s put a stop to the Mummy Wars’, Guardian, 23 April 2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/23/emma-donoghue-mummy-wars-parenting
‘Once Upon a Life’, Observer, 5 Sept 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/05/once-upon-life-emma-donoghue
‘Lesbian Mums’, Times, 7 August 2010
‘The Little Voices In Our Heads That Last a Lifetime’, Irish Times, 7 August 2010
‘Go On, You Choose’, in Who’s Your Daddy? And Other Writings on Queer Parenting, ed. Rachel Epstein (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2009)
‘A Free Space,’ in From Newman to New Woman: UCD Women Remember, ed. by Anne Macdona (Dublin: New Island, 2001)
'Proving It,' Siren (Toronto), October 1998
'The Youngest Child,' Women’s News (Belfast), November 1997
'A Pagan Place,' Gay Community News (Ireland), February 1996
‘Coming Out a Bit Strong’, Index on Censorship, 24, No. 1 (1995): 87-88
What the Critics Say
'Emma Donoghue is among the most fearless contemporary novelists we have: an immensely talented writer who is a great storyteller and, based on her extensive body of work, unafraid of subjects that give her less courageous peers pause.' - Washington Post (2023)
'Donoghue excels at turning historical eras and settings into compelling, believable fiction. Like the best teachers at school, she packs the learning and knowledge in without the reader ever getting bored. Nothing is laboured; her skill is her lightness of touch.' - Irish Times (2023)
'A master of the microcosm ... a trademark of Donoghue's fiction is the blend of profundity and plot' - Guardian (2023)
'Emma Donoghue is a genius of compassion. With her, the ethical imagination is always paramount. In our fractured world she brings a great sense of repair to us all. Her stories bind us back together.' - Colum McCann (2023)
'It's clear there’s no century in the history of this world that couldn’t be teased into a compelling read by author Emma Donoghue.' - Calgary Herald (2022)
'Donoghue often writes about outsiders ... combine[s] older-world settings with stories that have an eerie resonance for contemporary society. Her trademark is an ability to blend allegory, fairy tale, myth, and particularly meticulous research seamlessly into new works of fiction.' - Irish Times (2022)
'Few writers boomerang between genres and time periods as nimbly' - Reader's Digest (2020)
'Happily able to reinvent herself with everything she writes. ... Emma Donoghue has a gift for taking details from the past and creating believable and absorbing worlds around them.' - The Tablet (2020)
'Reading Donoghue’s books is sometimes like falling in love unexpectedly. She draws you in with her deep empathy for outsiders.' - The independent (2020)
'The Dublin-born writer is one of our greatest living prose stylists. ... She is serious, wise and funny. She draws from the mind’s eye and has a perfect ear for language as it is spoken.' - The Australian (2020)
''Donoghue [is] a cultural historian of no minor stature. ... a giant of letters.' - Irish Independent (2020)
'These rooms of Donoghue’s may be tiny and sealed off, yet they teem with life-and-death drama and great moral questions.' - Washington Post (2016)
'We can count on her to plumb the heart of human darkness.' - Newsday (2016)
'Donoghue is a master of plot, and her prose is especially exquisite at depicting ambiguity.' - Time (2016)
'She can do everything: be funny, be moving, be unflinching yet sensitive, write beautifully nuanced sentences and utterly gripping stories. She can write powerful historical fiction and be absolutely contemporary. And she's unable to write a line you don't believe.' - Joseph O'Connor (2015)
‘Reading an Emma Donoghue book is like falling into a deep friendship with an unlikely stranger: a lady of the evening, an cross-dressing frogcatcher, an imprisoned child. The author’s empathy for outsiders makes for captivating characters; she illustrates the complex inner lives of her creations with a candor that shows humanity at its best and worst.’ – Washington Post (2014)
‘An uncanny knack for telling an off-putting story in such a way that you can’t stop reading it, that you fall a little bit in love with the characters and the moment in time.' - 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 storyteller’s 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 imaginative range ... 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)
General Bibliography
James Little, 'Confinement and the Transnational in Emma Donoghue's Room,' Open Library of Humanities 8 (2), 2022, Special Collection: Local and Universal in Irish Literature and Culture, https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/8774/ A brilliant exploration, situating Room in the 'transnational' context of my whole career.
David Clare, Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase, The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716-2016, Volume 2 (1992-2016) (Liverpool University Press, 2021)
Linda Garber, Novel Approaches to Lesbian History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Introduction.
Ellen McWilliams, 'Transatlantic Encounters in the Writing of Emma Donoghue', in her Irishness in North American Women's Writing: Transatlantic Affinities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp.161-180.
Abigail L. Palko, ‘Emma Donoghue’, in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature (2020)
Ciaran O'Neill, ' ‘The cage of my moment’: a conversation with Emma Donoghue about history and fiction,' Journal of Historical Fictions 2:2, 2019 http://historicalfictionsjournal.org/pdf/JHF%202019-126.pdf
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2019/09/03/writer-emma-donoghue-on-why-children-have-such-a-hold-on-her-imagination.html
Michael Lackey, ‘Ireland, the Irish, and Biofiction,’ in Éire-Ireland, 53:1-2 (Spring/Summer 2018), 98-119.
Michael Lackey, ‘Emma Donoghue: Voicing the Nobodies in the Biographical Novel,’
in Éire-Ireland, 53:1-2 (Spring/Summer 2018), 120-133, and in his ed. Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 81-92.
Libe García Zarranz, TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017) studies my work (Slammerkin, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, Room and Astray) alongside that of Dionne Brand and Hiromi Goto.
Renee Fox (University of California, Santa Cruz), "Queering the Archive in Emma Donoghue's Neo-historical Fiction," paper delivered MLA 2017 (Philadelphia).
Stephanie Scott (Penn State), "At Home in the Nation: Hermeneutical Injustice in the Works of Jamie O'Neill and Emma Donoghue," papered delivered MLA 2017 (Philadelphia).
'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.
http://lithub.com/emma-donoghue-and-laird-hunt-on-writing-historical-women/
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/schedule-for-thursday-december-8-2016-1.3885126/emma-donoghue-s-musical-tribute-to-dublin-ireland-1.3885485
Debbie Brouckmans, 'The Short Story Cycle in Ireland: From Jane Barlow to Donal Ryan', PhD thesis (U of Leuven) 2015. A superb analysis of my story cycles as historiographic metafiction. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/34624902.pdf
Camille Harrigan (Concordia), "Reconciling Irishness and Queerness for the New Ireland: Emma Donoghue’s Early Work and the Voices of ‘Others’," paper delivered SOFEIR conference UNHEARD VOICES (Paris), March 2015.
Heather Ingman, Irish Women’s Fiction: From Edgeworth to Enright (Irish Academic Press, 2013), 247-48, discusses my fiction from Stir-fry to Room.
Reading from 'A Short Story' (in The Women Who Gave Birth to Rabbits) and talking about writing factual historical fiction at American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 11 October 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEpFiYSRGuw
Noah Charney, 'Emma Donoghue: The How I Write Interview', thedailybeast.com, 24 October 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/24/emma-donoghue-the-how-i-write-interview.html
Tom Ue, ‘An extraordinary act of motherhood: a conversation with Emma Donoghue,’ Journal of Gender Studies, 21:1 (2012), 101-106,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2012.639177
Dearbhla McGrath, ‘Marginal Identities: Representations of Sexuality in the Work of Emma Donoghue,’ paper delivered at Écrivaines Irlandaises / Irish Women Writers Conference (Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, 2010).
Jennifer M. Jeffers, “The Reclamation of ‘Injurious Terms’ in Emma Donoghue’s Fiction” in A Companion to Irish Literature, Vol. 2, ed. Julia M. Wright (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 425-35.
Judy Stoffman, ‘Writer has a Deft Touch with Sexual Identities’, Toronto Star, 13 January 2007.
Maureen E. Mulvihill, ‘Emma Donoghue’, in Irish Women Writers: An A-Z Guide, ed. Alexander G. Gonzales (Westwood, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2006), 98-101.
Brian Cliff, ‘Anne Enright and Emma Donoghue: The Desire to Belong in Contemporary Irish Fiction’, paper delivered at IASIL Conference (Sydney, 2006).
Eibhear Walshe, ‘Emma Donoghue, b. 1969’, in Anthony Roche, ed. The UCD Aesthetic: Celebrating 150 Years of UCD Writers (Dublin: New Island, 2005), 274-84.
Charlotte Abbott, ‘Protean Talent’, Publishers Weekly, 10 October 2004.
‘A Liking to be Noticed’, Sunday Independent (Ireland), 1 August 2004.
Kersti Tarien Powell, ‘Emma Donoghue’, in Irish Fiction: An Introduction (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), 108-110.
Jennifer M. Jeffers, The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies and Power (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 90-107.
Stacia L. Bensyl, ‘Emma Donoghue’, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 267, Twenty-First Century British and Irish Novelists, ed. by Michael R. Molino (Columbia, SC: Bruccoli Clark Layman, Inc, 2002).
Helen Thompson, interview in Irish Women Writers Speak Out, by Caitriona Moloney and Helen Thompson (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 169-180.
‘Don’t Tell Me You’ve Never Heard of Emma Donoghue’ (cover story), Eye Weekly (Toronto), 17 October 2002.
Anne Fogarty, ‘Lesbian Texts and Contexts: The Fiction of Emma Donoghue and Mary Dorcey’, paper delivered at Munster Women Writers Conference (2001).
Antoinette Quinn, 'New Noises from the Woodshed: The Novels of Emma Donoghue,' in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories, ed. by Liam Harte and Michael Parker (London: Macmillan, and New York: St Martin's, 2000), pp.145-167.
Stacia Bensyl, ‘Swings and Roundabouts: An Interview with Emma Donoghue’, Irish Studies Review, 8, No. 1 (2000), 73-81.
'Emma's Exploits', Globe and Mail (Canada), 7 October 2000.
'Loose Lives', Irish Examiner, 5 August 2000.
'All Het Up', Time Out (London), 2 August 2000.
'Writer in Residence', Image Magazine (Ireland), July 2000.
S. Díez, "Women's Homoerotic Voice in the Works of Emma Donoghue: Discovery and Assertion", paper delivered at IASIL (1999).
'Irish Spring', Bay Area Reporter, 1 April 1999
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. by Elaine Hutton (London: Women's Press, 1998).
Tonie van Marle, 'Emma Donoghue', in Gay and Lesbian Literature: Volume Two, ed. by Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast (Detroit: St James Press, 1998).
'We've a Long Way to Go', Gay Community News (Ireland), April 1997.
Marilyn R. Farwell, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), 170-71, 176.
'Sect Goddess,' Diva, April 1995.
'Family Ties: Frances Donoghue on her daughter, Emma Donoghue,' Sunday Tribune, 26 March 1995.
'Relative Values: Emma Donoghue, lesbian novelist and playwright, and her father, Denis, academic and critic,' Sunday Times, 26 March 1995.
'The Bishop and the Lesbian,' Guardian, 22 March 1995.
'Faith, Hope and Sexual Clarity,' Times, 23 February 1995.
