© Woodgate Photography 2024 (Hi-Res Download)
Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, I am the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic). I attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one eye-opening year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 I earned a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin (unfortunately, without learning to actually speak French). I moved to England, and in 1997 received my PhD (on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction) from the University of Cambridge. From the age of 23, I have earned my living as a writer, and have been lucky enough to never have an ‘honest job’ since I was sacked after a single summer month as a chambermaid. After years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 I settled in London, Ontario, where I live with Chris Roulston and our son Finn and daughter Una.
The Paris Express: Inspired by a French railway disaster of 1895 that went down in history thanks to a set of surreal photographs, this sweeping thriller brings together characters real and invented, rich and poor, from all over the world, on a steam train hurtling through the countryside. A #1 bestseller in Canada on publication, a bestseller in Ireland, and a US Indie bestseller.
Learned by Heart: The heartbreaking story of two very different women - diarist Anne Lister, the inspiration for the series Gentleman Jack, and orphaned biracial heiress Eliza Raine - who meet at fourteen and upend each other’s lives.
Haven: In this adventure story set around the year 600, three Irishmen vow to leave the world behind and set out in a small boat to found a monastery on an island their leader has seen in a dream, with only faith to guide them.
The Pull of the Stars: Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu. A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love.
Akin: A tale of love, loss and family, in which a retired New York professor’s life is thrown into chaos when he takes his great-nephew to the French Riviera, in hopes of uncovering his own mother's wartime secrets.
The Wonder: The Irish Midlands, 1859. An English nurse, Lib Wright, is summoned to a tiny village to observe what some are claiming as a medical anomaly or a miracle - a girl said to have survived without food for months.
Frog Music: Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heatwave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman called Jenny Bonnet is shot dead. The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny’s murderer to justice – if he doesn’t track her down first.
Room (London: Picador; Toronto: HarperCollins Canada; New York: Little Brown, 2010), my Man-Booker-shortlisted seventh novel, is the story of a five-year-old called Jack, who lives in a single room with his Ma and has never been outside. I wrote the screenplay of the film Room, directed by Lenny Abrahamson, and starring Brie Larson, which was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture.
The Sealed Letter (New York: Harcourt, 2008; Melbourne: Scribe, 2009; London: Picador, 2011). Based on a scandal that gripped Britain in the 1860s, this domestic thriller – my sixth novel - explores a feminist spinster’s reluctant involvement in a sordid divorce.
Landing (New York : Harcourt, 2007). A contemporary love story about emigration, Landing – my fifth novel - is set in boomtown Ireland and smalltown Canada. In 2008 the Golden Crown Literary Society
Life Mask (New York: Harcourt; London: Virago, 2004), my fourth novel, is about a love triangle in 1790s London, among the elite who moved through the overlapping worlds of art, politics, sport and theatre.
Hood (UK 1995, US 1996, reissued 2011). Penelope O’Grady and Cara Wall are risking disaster when, like teenagers in any intolerant time and place—here, a Dublin convent school in the late 1970s—they fall in love. In my second novel, Cara, the free spirit, and Pen, the stoic, craft a bond so strong it seems as though nothing could sever it, not even Cara’s infidelities. But thirteen years on, a car crash kills Cara and rips the lid off Pen’s world.
Slammerkin (London: Virago, 2000, reissued 2012; New York: Harcourt, 2000; Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2009). Inspired by a murder that took place in the Welsh Borders in 1763, Slammerkin, my third novel (and first historically inspired one), is about a prostitute obsessed with clothes.
Stir-fry (1994). My first novel, Stir-fry is a coming-of-age story about Maria, a seventeen-year-old girl from rural Ireland who goes to university in Dublin and accidentally moves in with a lesbian couple.
Astray (2012). This sequence of fourteen fact-inspired fictions about life-changing journeys to, in and from North America, which I have been writing one by one over the past decade and a half, is my eleventh book of fiction.
Three and a Half Deaths (UK/Ireland ebook, 2011). An accident, a suicide, an act of criminal negligence and a near-death experience. Published by Picador as a Short Reads ebook in December 2011, bringing together four fact-inspired stories from France, the USA and Canada.
Touchy Subjects (New York: Harcourt; London: Virago, 2006). My eighth book of fiction, this collection of contemporary stories about taboos and embarrassment ranges from Ireland to Louisiana, Canada to Tuscany, and includes characters old, young, queer, straight, and simply confused.
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (New York: Harcourt; London: Virago, 2002), my fifth book of fiction and second story collection, is a sequence of short stories about peculiar incidents in the history of the British Isles, from a 1300s Satanist to an 1800s animal-rights campaign.
Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (UK title, Kissing the Witch) (New York: Joanna Cotler Books, 1997), my third book of fiction and first story collection, is a sequence of thirteen re-imagined fairytales, inspired by traditional European sources (Brothers Grimm, Perrault, Hans Anderson).
Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (UK 1993, US 1996), my first book, is a groundbreaking and influential survey of printed texts on lesbian themes (trial records, newspapers, medical tracts, poems, novels, plays, etc) in English between the Restoration and the end of the eighteenth century.
We Are Michael Field (Bath: Absolute Press and New York: Stuart, Tabori and Chang, 1998). The first biography since the 1920s of the Victorian collaborative writers and lovers (as well as aunt and niece), Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote under the name Michael Field.
Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature (New York: Knopf, 2010; Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2010; paperback LA: Cleis, 2011). A dozen years in the making, Inseparable is a witty and scholarly guide to storylines of passion between women in Western (English, but also a lot of French, Italian, German, Spanish) literature since medieval times.
The Lotterys More Or Less: the second book about the four-parent family sees their winter holiday plans disrupted when an ice storm shuts down Toronto.
The Lotterys Plus One: The first in a series of novels aimed at readers aged eight to twelve introduces nine-year-old Sumac Lottery and her six siblings, four parents and five pets. This chaotic, happy household is disrupted when a grandfather with dementia suddenly has to move in. The Lotterys Plus One made the best-of-the-year lists from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly and the Irish Times.
