I began by writing about contemporary Dublin before the Boom in a coming-of-age novel, Stir-fry (1994), and a tale of bereavement, Hood (1995, winner of the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Book Award, and recently republished by HarperCollins in the US), and I returned to my transformed home city with a love story that contrasts it with smalltown Ontario in Landing (2007, winner of a Golden Crown Literary Award).

An international bestseller, Room was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prize, and won the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Prize (Canada & Carribbean Region), the Canadian Booksellers’ Association Libris Awards (Fiction Book and Author of the Year), the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award and the W.H. Room (2010) is narrated by a five-year-old called Jack, who lives in a single room with his Ma and has never been outside. The 2022 feature film starring Florence Pugh was co-written by me, director Sebastián Lelio and Alice Birch.įrog Music (2014) is a literary mystery inspired by a never-solved murder of a crossdressing frog catcher in San Francisco in 1876. Inspired by about fifty cases of 'fasting girls' over the centuries, The Wonder (2016, a finalist for Canada's Giller Prize and Ireland's Kerry Group Novel of the Year) is about an English nurse sent to the Irish Midlands in 1859 to watch a little girl whose parents claim is living without food. My series for middle-grade readers (8 to 12), The Lotterys, includes The Lotterys Plus One (2017) and The Lotterys More Or Less (2018), both illustrated by Caroline Hadilaksono. My first contemporary novel for adults after Room was Akin ( 2019) it's about a retired New York professor and his eleven-year-old great-nephew going to the French Riviera to unearth the professor's mother's wartime secrets. My 2020 novel The Pull of the Stars was inspired by the centenary of the Great Flu of 1918 and is set in a Dublin hospital where a nurse midwife, a doctor and a volunteer helper fight to save patients in a tiny maternity quarantine ward. My latest novel Haven (2022) imagines the experience of the first three people to land on Skellig Michael around the year 600. Although I work in many genres, I am best known for my fiction, which has been translated into over forty languages.

Book haven emma donoghue