Virago Press

Emma Donoghue is an Irish writer who has published twelve books of fiction, drama and literary history. Born in Dublin in 1969, she grew up in Ireland before spending eight years in Cambridge doing a PhD in eighteenth-century literature. She moved to London, Ontario, in Canada, in 1998, and lives there with her partner and child.

Her fiction includes two novels set in contemporary Ireland, Stir-Fry (1994) and Hood (1995) – which won the American Library Association's Gay and Lesbian Book Award. Her next book was a sequence of re-imagined fairytales, Kissing the Witch (1997).

Slammerkin (2000) is a bestseller inspired by an eighteenth-century murder. She followed this with two more historical titles, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (historical short stories, 2002) and Life Mask (based on a 1790s scandal, 2004). Her novels have been translated into Dutch, German, Swedish, Hebrew, Catalan, Greek and Italian.

Recently she has returned to the contemporary with Touchy Subjects (stories about social taboos, 2006) and her forthcoming long-distance love story, Landing (2007).

Donoghue's stage plays include I Know My Own Heart (1993), based on the secret 1820s diaries of an English heiress, and Ladies and Gentlemen (1996, published 1998) a play with songs about an 1880s vaudeville 'male impersonator'. She adapted her fairytales, Kissing the Witch, into a full-length play for the Magic Theater in San Francisco.

Her first radio play, Trespasses (RTE, 1996), was based on an Irish witch trial of the 1670s; her second, Don't Die Wondering, a modern Irish comedy about a one-woman strike, was an Afternoon Play on BBC Radio 4 in 2000. She has
written two drama series for Woman’s Hour on Radio 4: Exes (about getting on – or not- with your ex, 2001), and Humans and Other Animals (about pets, 2003). Mix (2003), an hour-long drama about an intersexed girl, was her first play for BBC Radio 3.

Emma Donoghue's first work in the history of sexuality, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (1993), was followed by two anthologies, What Sappho Would Have Said (1997), and The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories (1999). Her excursion into biography, We Are Michael Field (1998), is a short, quirky study of two Victorian women poets.

She has also presented a prime-time book series on Irish television, served as a judge for (among others) the Irish Times Literary Prizes, and taught creative writing for the Cheltenham Literary Festival, the Arvon Foundation, University of Western Ontario and the University of York.

For more information go to www.emmadonoghue.com.

'A real writer with a gift for dialogue, a hard-edged wit and an admirable determination to make her own world' IRISH TIMES

'Donoghue displays her confidence by avoiding the grandiose and showy, and dipping into the ordinary with control and the occasional sustaining descriptive flashes of a born writer' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

'A writer and scholar of astonishing versatility and erudition' SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER AND CHRONICLE