Emma Donoghue
Irish author Emma Donoghue is best known as an award-winning novelist, but she shows her scholarly side (Ph.D. from Cambridge University) in her latest volume of literary history: Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature, the study of a thousand years of girl-girl action between the pages. In 2010, her most recent novel, the psychologically harrowing Room, became an international bestseller. These are the latest installments in a writing career that began when Donoghue was just 23 and nabbed a two-novel deal with a major publisher—since then, she’s written dozens of works of fiction, plays and nonfiction, and her novel Slammerkin won the 2002 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. Most importantly, perhaps, she’s avoided having to get “an honest job” after she was fired from an ill-advised position as a chambermaid. Surprisingly, Donoghue didn’t always want to be a writer. “First I wanted to be a ballerina, but at about eight years old, I realized I was going to be too tall, so I settled for literature. This way I get to eat more cake,“ she says. After years of transatlantic commuting between England, the U.S. and Canada, Donoghue finally settled in Ontario, where she lives with her partner and their two children.
