A WRITER’S LIFE: Packed with generous sympathy
EMMA Donoghue was born in Dublin in 1969, the youngest of eight children. Her father was the literary critic, Denis Donoghue. She went to UCD and studied English and French, then moved to England and did a PhD at Cambridge. She has written screenplays, short stories, children’s books and non-fiction as well as novels, and counts herself lucky enough to never have had an “honest job” since being sacked after a single summer month as a chambermaid.
In 2004, Publishers Weekly described her as “distinguished by her generous sympathy for her characters, sinuous prose and an imaginative range that may soon rival that of AS Byatt or Margaret Atwood”.
In 2010 she published Room, an international bestseller that was shortlisted for the Man
Booker and Orange Prize, and won the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, along with many other awards.
Room was very soon made into a film directed by Lenny Abrahamson, for which Emma wrote the screenplay. It won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Film, the
Irish Film and Television Academy Award for Best Film, among many other awards. Emma now lives in London, Ontario, with Chris Roulston and their children, Finn and Una.
In 2011, she wrote a wise and funny piece on parenting: “If you’re out in public with your kids, it can feel as though the CCTV cameras are always trained your way. Every parent I know jokes about the nightmarish possibility of being reported to Child Protection Services. You can bring down the wrath of a stranger simply by failing to keep a broadbrimmed sunhat on your child or letting her race around with a lollipop in her mouth.
“You might think that, having defied convention when it came to conception (anonymous donor, two mothers, as I tell anyone at the playground rash enough to ask ‘is their dad tall?’), I’d be relaxed about what people thought of my parenting at the micro level. But no, I still get that Bad Mum Blush when our daughter bloodies her knee and I — not having a plaster — have to improvise with an old tissue.”