Works by
Emma Donoghue
(Writer)

Fiction

• Hood (1995) -- Winner of the 1997 American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Book Award for Literature.
  Novel about bereavement and the closet, which follows Pen, a Dublin schoolteacher, through the first week after the death of her on-off lover of thirteen years, Cara.

• Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997) -- Shortlisted for a James Tiptree Award; named an ALA Popular Paperback for Young Adults.
  Sequence of thirteen re-imagined fairytales, inspired by traditional European sources (Brothers Grimm, Perrault, Hans Anderson).

• Stir-Fry (1994) -- Finalist Lambda Literary Awards
  Coming-of-age novel about Maria, a seventeen-year-old girl from rural Ireland who comes to university in Dublin and accidentally moves in with a lesbian couple.

• Slammerkin (2000) -- Main Selection of the Book of the Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club; finalist in the 2001 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction; a Barnes and Noble Discover Selection; a Book Sense 76 Selection; one of the Notable Books of 2001 chosen by Publishers Weekly and the New York Times.
  Inspired by a murder that took place in the Welsh Borders in 1763, Slammerkin (meaning a loose dress, and a loose woman) is Donoghue's first historical novel, a gripping study of a prostitute obsessed with clothes.

• The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: Stories (2002)
  This is a sequence of short stories about peculiar little incidents in the history of the British Isles, from a 1300s Satanist to an 1800s animal-rights campaign.

• Life Mask (2004) - Finalist, 2004 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction
  Life Mask is about a love triangle in 1790s London, among the elite who moved through the overlapping worlds of art, politics, sport and theatre. It tells the tangled true story of three people who lived in the harsh glare of publicity: the Honourable Mrs Anne Damer (a widowed sculptor with a Sapphic reputation), the Earl of Derby (a fabulously wealthy politician who founded the Derby horserace), and Eliza Farren (the leading comedy actress on the British stage).

• Touchy Subjects: Stories (2006) -- Nominated 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction
  In this sparkling collection of nineteen stories, the bestselling author of Slammerkin returns to contemporary affairs, exposing the private dilemmas that result from some of our most public controversies. A man finds God and finally wants to father a child-only his wife is now forty-two years old. A coach's son discovers his sexuality on the football field. A roommate's bizarre secret liberates a repressed young woman. From the unforeseen consequences of a polite social lie to the turmoil caused by the hair on a woman's chin, Donoghue dramatizes the seemingly small acts upon which our lives often turn. Many of these stories involve animals and what they mean to us, or babies and whether to have them; some replay biblical plots in modern contexts. With characters old, young, straight, gay, and simply confused, Donoghue dazzles with her range and her ability to touch lightly but delve deeply into the human condition.

Edited by Emma Donoghue:

• The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories (1999)
  Building on the success of The Mammoth Book of Gay Short Stories, The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories collects an international array of the best-known lesbian authors and new talents. Few of the stories have been anthologized before, and some have been specially commissioned for this work. With its focus on new writing, editor and author Emma Donoghue has gathered stories from such writers as Dorothy Allison, Patricia Dunker, Tanith Lee, Jennifer Levin, Anna Livia, Ingrid Macdonald, Sara Maitland, Shani Mootoo, Elizabeth Taylor, Shay Youngblood, and many others.

• Best Lesbian Erotica 2007 (2007) with Tristan Taromino -- Finalist 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Erotica (Lesbian)

Non-fiction

• Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (1994)
  In the tradition of Lillian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men and John Boswell's Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe--a groundbreaking work of lesbian scholarship that presents a revisionist and frankly sexual look at 18th-century lesbian culture.

• Poems Between Women (1997) -- Finalist 1998 Lambda Literary Award for Anthologies
  With poems in English by over one hundred female poets -American, English, Scottish, Canadian, South African, Indian, Irish, and Australian -this is an extraordinary collection that pays homage to four centuries of women´s desires, friendships, and expressions of love. The collection is testimony to the rich tradition of female verse and the timelessness of love and creativity.

•  We Are Michael Field (1998)

See also:

• Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel (2001) by Dermot Bolger with Anne Haverty, Clare Boylan, Dermot Bolger, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Emma Donoghue, Joan Miro, Kate ORiordan, and Maeve Binchy