Emma Donoghue (born 24 October 1969) is an Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin (2000) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room was adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Background Donoghue was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1969. The youngest of eight children, she is the daughter of Frances (born Rutledge) and academic and literary critic Denis Donoghue. She has a first-class honours Bachelor of Arts degree from University College Dublin (in English and French) and a PhD in English from Girton College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge she lived in a women's co-operative, an experience which inspired her short story "The Welcome". Her thesis was on friendship between men and women in 18th-century fiction. At Cambridge, she met her future wife, Christine Roulston, a Canadian who is now professor of French and Women's Studies at the University of Western Ontario. They moved permanently to Canada in 1998 and Donoghue became a Canadian citizen in 2004. She lives in London, Ontario, with Roulston and their two children. Influences and approach to writing Donoghue has spoken of the importance of the writing of Emily Dickinson, of Jeanette Winterson's novel The Passion and Alan Garner's Red Shift in the development of her work. She says that she aims to be "industrious and unpretentious" about the process of writing, and that her working life has changed since having children. Works Stir Fry and Hood Donoghue's first novel was 1994's Stir Fry, a contemporary coming of age novel about a young Irish woman discovering her sexuality. It was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 1994. This was followed in 1995 by Hood, another contemporary story, this time about an Irish woman coming to terms with the death of her girlfriend. Hood won the 1997 American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Book Award for Literature (now known as the Stonewall Book Award for Literature). Slammerkin Slammerkin (2000) is a historical novel set in London and Wales. Inspired by an 18th-century newspaper story about a young servant who killed her employer and was executed, the protagonist is a prostitute who