Irish Novelist Emma Donoghue to Read at Boston College

The Institute for the Liberal Arts and the Irish Studies Program will welcome the Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter Emma Donoghue back to Boston College. Donoghue will read from her 2020 novel The Pull of the Stars on Wednesday, April 7 at 7:00 pm. Inspired by the centenary of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, The Pull of the Stars is set in a Dublin hospital where a nurse midwife, a doctor, and a volunteer fight to save patients in a tiny maternity quarantine ward. As reviewer Maureen Corrigan claims, Donoghue has “given us our first pandemic caregiver novel — an engrossing and inadvertently topical story about health care workers inside small rooms fighting to preserve life.” This virtual reading will be followed by a moderated discussion and audience Q&A. Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, Donohue is the youngest of eight children. In 1990 she earned a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin. In 1997 she received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, writing her dissertation on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize as well as an international best-seller and the basis of a successful film for which Donohue wrote the screenplay. Her 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and another novel, Slammerkin, won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction.