Emma Donoghue found herself propelled into the literary stratosphere with the publication of her Booker-shortlisted novel Room, a story "triggered" by the case of Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter in a cellar underneath the family home for 24 years and fathered seven children by her.
Donoghue tells John Mullan that her aim was always to look at the incarceration from the child's point of view, and to examine Jack's fate in two halves: his life locked away in a tiny shed, and his discovery of the outside world. She explains how her son, who was four when she was writing the novel, gave her the language of the book and inspired her to let her narrator make friends of the objects that share his captivity.
Reading list
Room by Emma Donoghue (Picador)
