A Room With A Prize

The London, Ont. based author may have been born in Dublin, but Emma Donoghue was proud to be Canadian as she accepted the $25,00 Writers’ Trust Fiction for her novel Room last night, during the award ceremony at the Isabel Bader theatre in downtown Toronto.

Told entirely in the voice of five-year-old Jack, a boy who has been held captive with his mother since before his birth, the story was hailed by the Writers’ Trust jury as “a brave novel that, through pure artistry, achieves a fine balance on a number of sharp edges: fierce love and unspeakable cruelty, delicate humour and glimpses of profound darkness.” Published by Harper Collins, the book is also on the shortlist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards and was a finalist for the Booker Prize.