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For a “Dublin girl from peasant stock,” Emma Donoghue made a surprising entrée into the Hollywood elite. She joined a group of veteran screenwriters as the nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 88th 2016 Academy Awards, for her first feature-length screenplay, fashioned from her own best-selling novel, Room. While Donoghue did not win, her “Ma” character, Brie Larson, won for Best Actress and named Donoghue in her acceptance speech. A month later, Donoghue and the film, Room, were crowned with Canada’s highest awards, nine in all, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Canadian Screen Awards. Monumental Pictures has optioned her eighth novel, Frog Music, set in 1870s San Francisco, and Donoghue is adapting the screenplay for this film.

Donoghue, ever the writer, published another novel in September of 2016, The Wonder, about a nineteenth-century Irish girl who claims not to eat. In a country where approximately a million people starved and a million more emigrated from Ireland during Gorta Mór, the Great Famine—sometimes known as the Irish Potato Famine from 1845-1852—this is another of those stories that has yet to be told from such a unique vantage point.

Donoghue made her living as a writer for the first twenty-five years of her writing career and became more high-profile after her 2016 Academy Award nomination and Canadian Screen Award. Her historical novels include: The Sealed Letter, Life Mask, and Slammerkin, set in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Her contemporary novels—Landing, Hood and Stir-fry—feature lesbian characters at the center. She’s written many plays and short story collections before achieving global best-seller status with Room. Emma Donoghue has this advice for writers: “My experience is a fluke. So don’t delude yourself that it’s the job that’s thwarting your wish to write the great novel. Many great first or fifth or tenth novels are written by people with jobs who somehow—and they have all my respect—summon up the energy before or after work to write.” Outside writing, the only job Emma ever had was as a summer chambermaid, from which she was fired. Born in 1969, success is lapping at her doorstep at her home in London, Ontario that she shares with Canadian French and Women’s Studies academic Christine Roulston and their two children, Finn (b. 2003) and Una (b. 2007).

When Donoghue was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for her novel Room, she said she was able to “stride proudly to the bakery “If I hadn’t been on the short list, I would have had to stay home this week, because I couldn’t stand all the little nods of sympathy” (The Globe and Mail, 9/7/10). Ever self-effacing, she said she felt like a tourist on the runway of all the award shows honoring Room. She did wear a full-length gown, but aside from that, haute couture is not her thing. Room was Donoghue’s first “high-concept” novel. She had a good feeling about it from the start and it wrote so easily.

Donoghue has managed to bring lesbians into the literary pantheon of good writing with her consummate storytelling skills. Her first novel, Stir-fry, written at age twenty-one, presaged her talent. “This evocative and insightful novel is destined to become a classic in lesbian literature,” The Village Voice opined. Her second novel, Hood, re-released following her success with Room, encapsulates the singular season of grief in the container of a week. A closeted lesbian has lost her lover in a car accident and reckons with the loss alongside some unexpected companions. Pen is still in the closet, teaching at her old school, living under the roof of Cara’s gentle father, who thinks of her as his daughter’s friend. How can she survive widowhood without even daring to claim the word? Hood answers the question.

Donoghue was “tickled pink it’s been re-released “I suppose Hood—being the first of my books that made me stretch into making-it-all-up territory—gave me confidence for other challenges to come. You also take what you’ve lived and extrapolate from it; I knew what it was like to be dumped and figured bereavement would have at least something in common with that.”

Never in the margins or relegated to the LGBTQ sections of bookstores, Donoghue tackles the tough subjects—love, infidelity, mother-child bonds, family, class, immigration, and death. Educated at University College, Dublin, and the University of Cambridge, England, Donoghue, PhD, writes with an unparalleled command of language and a piercing understanding of the human heart. That is why her strong voice has emerged above the din, catapulting Donoghue, a lesbian writer, into the wide world of literary and film achievement. “I think the most important way to resist pigeonholing is to write about LGBTQ matters without apology, but also without coziness—assuming an LGBTQ readership—or crankiness—lecturing a straight readership. It also helps if you concentrate on some big life-or-death topics that matter to everybody. But you know, I’ve never objected to being called a lesbian writer, that would be bad manners, like badmouthing your own ethnic group,” she said.

The Golden Box Office Award, given to a Canadian film by a Canadian director/screenwriter that performs exceptionally well at the box office, earning at least $1 million, comes with a cash prize of $40,000, which is usually shared by the director and screenwriter. Because Room director Lenny Abrahamson is not Canadian, Donoghue won half the award, $20,000, at the Canadian Screen Awards. However, she decided to donate the money to the ImagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, which features aboriginal projects. “I think everyone can agree that this particular year there’s no doubt that how to make the film industry better is to make it more diverse,” said Donoghue. “And as a woman entering into screenwriting, where we are probably a minority compared with men, I’m so aware that you need help to get into an industry that can seem like it has closed walls” (The Canadian Press, 3/15/16).

What advice would Donoghue give to anyone who wants to become a writer? “Write a lot, write with passion. Don’t give up the day job till you have reason to believe you can live off your writing, because plenty of great books have been written at weekends, and why put your art under pressure to be profitable? If you write poems or stories, submit them to magazines. If you write a novel, rewrite it several times, and then, only when you think it’s great, try to find an agent who’ll sell it to a publisher.”

Critics have honored Donoghue with the highest praise in a numbed social media-driven world: “Donoghue’s great strength—apart from her storytelling gift—is her emotional intelligence” (Irish Independent, 2010). The BBC Radio Ulster called her 2012 full-length play, The Talk of the Town, “mesmerizing.” The NY Times lauded Room: “This is a truly memorable novel, one that can be read through myriad lenses—psychological, sociological, political. It presents an utterly unique way to talk about love, all the while giving us a fresh, expansive eye on the world in which we live.”

The most amazing thing about Emma Donoghue is how she is responding to this new-found fame. Co-creating this indie film with the Irish and Canadian Film Boards and working closely with fellow Dubliner, Director Lenny Abrahamson, Donoghue holds no illusions about the film’s uncommon success. She does hold to the truth of her novel, an exploration of the mother-child bond, written when Donoghue was the mother of a four-year-old boy and a one-year-old girl. She considers Room an extraordinary love story. As for how this independent, small-budget, nuanced film reached such commercial heights against a backdrop of big-budget films, she reacts in a 2016 TVO interview with Steve Paiken, “Who needs ‘em—car chases, special effects—they do not touch the heart.” That’s why Donoghue kept the rights to her novel and wrote the screenplay herself. Her only complaint now: “The perverse thing about success—it leads to lots of interviews.”

“I think the most important way to resist pigeonholing is to write about LGBTQ matters without apology, but also without coziness—assuming an LGBTQ readership—or crankiness—lecturing a straight readership. It also helps if you concentrate on some big life-or-death topics that matter to everybody. But you know, I’ve never objected to being called a lesbian writer, that would be bad manners, like badmouthing your own ethnic group.”

Emma Donoghue