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Photograph of Emma Donoghue
Katrina Afonso · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Licence · Wikimedia Commons

Sapphic romance

Emma Donoghue

born 1969

Novelist, playwright and historian of lesbian life; author of Room, Hood and Kissing the Witch.

Born
October 1969 · Dublin, Ireland
Nationality
Irish-Canadian
  • fairy-tale retellings
  • historical fiction
  • lesbian fiction
  • Booker shortlist

A reference author. Valice Press has no connection with Emma Donoghue, their publishers or their estate. Emma Donoghue appears here as part of the reading context around the shelf.

Biography

The life, briefly

Emma Donoghue was born in Dublin, the youngest of eight children of the critic Denis Donoghue. She took a first-class degree in English and French at University College Dublin and a PhD in English at Girton College, Cambridge, and moved permanently to Canada in 1998, becoming a Canadian citizen in 2004.

She is a novelist, screenwriter, playwright and literary historian. Her first novel, Stir-Fry (1994), was a coming-of-age story about a young Irish woman discovering her sexuality; her fiction ranges from contemporary stories to historical novels, and she is also the author of a history of British lesbian culture.

Works

Major works

  1. 1993Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801her history of the period
  2. 1994Stir-Fryher first novel; a Lambda Literary Award finalist
  3. 1995Hoodwon the Stonewall Book Award
  4. 1997Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skinsthirteen retold fairy tales
  5. 2000Slammerkina historical novel of London and Wales; won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction
  6. 2010Roomshortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; she adapted it for the film
  7. 2014Frog Music
  8. 2023Learned by Heart

Timeline

Turning points

  1. 1993

    Published her history Passions Between Women.

  2. 1995

    Hood won the Stonewall Book Award.

  3. 1998

    Moved permanently to Canada.

  4. 2004

    Became a Canadian citizen.

  5. 2010

    Room was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

  6. 2025

    Won the Alice B Readers Award, given to living writers whose careers are distinguished by consistently well-written works about lesbians.

Why they are here

Emma Donoghue and the shelf

Relevance

Donoghue is a rare writer who has worked as historian, fiction writer and fairy-tale reteller on women who love women. Kissing the Witch, in particular, retells Cinderella, Snow White and others from the point of view of the women in them.

Influence

Room made her a best-selling author internationally, and she was nominated for an Academy Award for adapting it as a screenplay. She has won both the Stonewall Book Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award.

Nearby on the shelf

If you read this, you might look here

These are Valice Press titles from the same part of the library. They are not by Emma Donoghue, and they are not a recommendation on Emma Donoghue’s behalf — only the same shelf.

Related authors

Read alongside

Sources

Where this comes from

Everything on this page about Emma Donoghue is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.