Born in Dublin， Ireland， on 24 October 1969， Emma is the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue. She attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin， apart from one year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 she earned a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin， and in 1997 a PhD （on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction） from the University of Cambridge. Since the age of 23， Donoghue has earned her living as a full-time writer. After years of commuting between England， Ireland， and Canada， in 1998 she settled in London， Ontario， where she lives with her lover and their son.
Fiction
Donoghue is best known for her fiction， which includes two contemporary Dublin novels， Stirfry （1994） and Hood （1995， winner of the American Library Association's Gay and Lesbian Book Award）； a sequence of re-imagined fairytales （published for adults in the UK and for the YA market in the US） called Kissing the Witch （1997， shortlisted for the James L. Tiptree Award）； a historical novel inspired by an eighteenth-century murder， Slammerkin （2000， winner of the 2002 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction， and a finalist in the 2001 Irish Times Irish Fiction Prize）； a sequence of historical short stories， THE WOMAN WHO GAVE BIRTH TO RABBITS （2002）； and LIFE MASK （2004）， which tells the startling true story of a scandalous love triangle in 1790s London. Her novels have been translated into Dutch， German， Swedish， Spanish， Catalan， Hebrew and Greek， and she is a four-times Finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards.
Drama
Donoghue writes drama both for the stage and for radio. Her first play， I Know my Own Heart （1993）， was inspired by the decoded diaries of a Regency Yorkshirewoman， Anne Lister， and was premiered by Dublin's Glasshouse Productions in 1993； it was published in Seen and Heard： Six New Plays by Irish Women， edited by Cathy Leeney. Glasshouse and the Irish Arts Council commissioned Donoghue to write Ladies and Gentlemen， a play with songs about 1880s vaudeville stars， which premiered in 1996 and was published by New Island Press in 1998； the first US production was by Outward Spiral Theatre in Minneapolis， 1999. Donoghue's adaptation of her fairy-tale book， KISSING THE WITCH， premiered at San Francisco's Magic Theatre on 9 June 2000 and received its first Canadian production at Buddies in Bad Times in Toronto in March 2002.
Donoghue's radio plays are Trespasses （1996， about a seventeenth-century Irish witch trial） for RTE （Ireland）， and Don't Die Wondering （2000， a romantic comedy set in a small Irish town）， EXES （2001， a series of five short plays about getting on with your ex）， and Humans and Other Animals （2003， a series of five short plays about pets）， all for BBC Radio 4.
Literature history
Emma Donoghue is also known as a literary historian； her work includes Passions Between Women： British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 （1993） and We Are Michael Field （1998， a biography of a pair of Victorian women writers）。 She has edited two anthologies， What Sappho Would Have Said （U.S. title Poems Between Women， 1997） and The Mammoth Book Of Lesbian Short Stories （1999）。
She has been a writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario and the University of York， been a judge for the Irish Times Literature Prizes， and a shareholder of the National Theatre of Ireland. Emma Donoghue is a member of the Society of Authors， the Writer's Union of Canada， and the Playwright's Guild of Canada.
