Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is a novelist, screenwriter and playwright. Room sold more than two million copies and won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and the Caribbean), as well as being shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes. Donoghue scripted the Canadian-Irish film adaptation, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The Wonder was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Donoghue co-wrote the 2022 screen adaptation for Netflix. The Pull of the Stars was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Donoghue’s fiction ranges from the contemporary (Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing, Touchy Subjects, Akin) to the historical (Haven, Slammerkin, The Sealed Letter, Astray, Frog Music) and includes two books for young readers, The Lotterys Plus One and The Lotterys More or Less. Recently, Chris Muise spoke with her about her latest literary work, The Paris Express.

Let’s talk a bit about your background, your early life, and how you got interested in writing.
I’m an Irish immigrant, twice over. I spent my first 20 years in Dublin, and then I went to England to do a PhD at Cambridge for eight years. By that time, I’d fallen in love with a Canadian, so I followed her to Ontario. I’ve been in London, Ontario, ever since. From London to London! Around age seven, I tried writing a poem, and I remember thinking, ‘whoa, this is the single-most exciting thing I ever did.’ The thrill of putting together words that had never been put together before just blew my mind. It still feels just as much fun. I’ve always written a lot, and I’ve always redrafted a lot, so I always jump into that first draft in a spirit of play. It doesn’t matter how bad it is. I’ve heard it described as ‘fill the sandbox first, then you can build the castles.’

One of your biggest successes was Room. You wrote both the book and the screenplay. What was the difference, especially when it’s the same story?
It’s the same storytelling process, but you’re using totally different techniques. It’s all about faces and visuals and having a very kind of clean, clear storyline to pull you through those scenes, so there are way fewer words. But I love both, and I particularly enjoy the adaptation process. I like seeing how a story will work again in different forms. I’ve had the opportunity to make Room a film first, and then a play. It’s just fascinating to study how different forms bring out different aspects of the same story.

Your new novel, The Paris Express, is rooted in reality.
Yes, it’s based on the true story of a train disaster in France in 1895, which was recorded in an amazingly surreal photograph of a train dangling out the side of a building. I spotted this photograph as we were about to go to live in France for a year because my partner is a French professor – she gets sabbaticals. I Googled the area we were moving to, saw that photograph, and thought, ‘that’s my next novel.’ Writing a story of an accident on public transit is a great way to bring together lots of different characters and have their fates all bound together. Some may be rich, sitting in the swanky first-class carriage, while others are poor and crammed into third class, but they’re all risking the same thing. I realized that the story of a technology gone wrong would be very interesting because, nowadays, we’re so often grabbed by the latest technology. We never think about it. It’s just going to lead to the robot overlords taking my job or crashing my plane; I saw a similarity with steam travel in the 19th century. I love finding examples of things that are very real and important in our lives, but from centuries ago, because it makes history rhyme with the present, and it gives a really fresh angle on something like the question of technology or economic growth. I knew that the story of a train hurtling through the Paris countryside would be a great way to make a little parable about society and how we tend to leap on something and pursue it headlong and without stopping to think what might happen. It captures the politics, fears and chaos at the end of the 19th century; what a prescient time to be doing this story. We have social media as the speeding train leading us into the current morass that’s going on politically in the world right now, as I’m sure you’re aware. Some of my characters are political radicals on the left, or the anarchist side of things, and they’re saying, ‘we have a tyrannical government! What should we do in response?’ Do you keep trying to tinker away, making things just slightly better in your own neighbourhood? Or do you turn to violence? The book asks those big political questions. I love when a book has what seems like a fluffy vibe like, oh, this will be enjoyably exotic, but actually it turns out to be about really substantial and gripping things.

How long did it take to complete this book, and how much research did it involve?
I think it took me about two years of just bottomless levels of research because almost all the people on my fictional train are real people. I knew a handful of real passengers who’d been on the train that day that I gleaned from about 40 newspaper articles, which were my main source. And I knew the crew of the train. I knew their names and details about them, but I didn’t know who the rest of the people were, so I decided to use real people at the time who could have been on the train. It meant having to research about 20 people. But I so enjoyed it. I just did a deep dive on 1890s France; the clothes of the time, the food, the tech. They’d have been carrying things like portable typewriters or a movie camera. I just absolutely loved bringing that period to life. It’s probably the most enjoyable period I’ve set a novel in.

Have you done something with this kind of extensive research into real people and events before this?
Yeah, this is probably my trademark. I do this every time. It’s also true of modern novels like Room, which is set nowadays; I researched every case I could find of feral children – children growing up hidden or locked away or a stunted kind of situation. My background is academic in that I did a PhD, so that’s just the approach I take to any project. There’s never been a better time to research historical fiction because you can find out anything you need through online resources – databases of newspapers, genealogy sites. You can track down anything with a good library and the internet, and so I feel I can turn to writing whatever I like because I know that my research skills will get me there, for sure.

Speaking of writing what you like, what is next on your horizon?
I’ve got a play coming up on an Irish theme for the Blythe Festival in Blythe, Ontario. They’ve commissioned a play – a musical – from me, about the Irish settling in Canada in the 1840s during the Great Famine. It’s about a real family who came from Antrim in Northern Ireland and settled in the southwestern Ontario area, and it’s a tragic love story. It’s all based on the real letters, and I use traditional Irish songs to tell the story. It’s my first musical, which is quite exciting. The main woman in my story, I found her actual blanket in a local museum; the blanket she knitted. I’ve even touched it – very carefully, because it’s got a few holes in it. But I was so moved to touch her blanket. The show is called The Wind Coming Over the Sea, and it’s all about emigration then and now because, again, when you write about the past, it always echoes today. The hostility to Irish immigrants in the 1840s, it’s just like you hear from the MAGA movement about immigrants to America now. And as someone who has emigrated twice, obviously I feel really strongly about how immigrants are such a wealth to a country. They may need a bit of help when they first arrive but, you know, their children will be the foundation of your economy. Things that we take for granted and cherish in our culture today came from people who were ostracized and vilified when they arrived as immigrants generations ago. Absolutely. We’re seen as germ-spreading beggars and, to be fair, the Irish in the 1840s were beggars. But they were also going to be a huge contribution to the economy. If you take the long historical view, you realize that every group, no matter how alien they seem at first, will join in and add to the party. The Blythe Festival is the biggest commissioner of new Canadian plays, by the way, having premiered over 150 new Canadian plays. It’s in a small town, but it’s a big theatre and they do nothing but brand-new Canadian plays, which is so rare; usually, summer theatres or rural theatres would play it a bit safe. But Blythe does nothing but … new stuff. They often have a kind of a rural element to the stories, which, again, is unusual. Plays tend to be a city thing. Blythe is remarkable that way. Gotta love patrons of the arts!

Lastly, in terms of Irish and – more broadly – Celtic culture, do you think it’s represented enough in today’s media, literature, etc.? If not, how do you think that can be improved?
I don’t know. In southwestern Ontario, I feel it’s all around me. It’s been a very easy place for me to immigrate to. Irish bands come here; I meet people of Irish origins all the time. I feel there’s a really warm welcome for even my accent, and in doing a show like this one, it shows the kind of global reach of Celtic culture, and I think a lot of people can relate. People here tend to be very proud of their element of Irish ancestry. And you know what’s nice? Going back to Ireland all the time, as I do, to find Ireland becoming more delightfully mixed, too. When I was growing up, everybody looked like me. But now, now there’s people from all over the world in Ireland.

You hear people like Elon Musk these days saying we’re mixing too much, saying stuff like ‘why can’t we have a place for these people, and a place for those people?’ But mixing, moving around, and being in places doesn’t mean you’re not being proud of your heritage, or that you’re not sharing or showing it.
Absolutely. In a city like Toronto, if I’m in Little India, it just seems the best of both worlds. People get to keep their flavour, their traditions, and yet enthusiastically take part in Canadian culture. I’ve never felt so proud of being in Canada, with the recent surge of a new kind of nationalism in response to what’s happening to the south of us. Because people aren’t saying Canada is one thing. They’re saying we are multicultural and that’s a distinct asset.

www.emmadonoghue.com
images courtesy of Woodgate Photography