Much has been made of Donoghue's status as an outsider on the Booker longlist, someone who is finally getting her moment in the sun Donoghue doesn't view it that way at all. She left Ireland in her 20s to complete a doctorate at Cambridge, published her first novel, Stir Fry, in 1994 at the age of 25, and has not looked back. Born in Dublin in 1969, the youngest of eight, Donoghue was the only member of her brood to follow her father into a literary career. The couple live in Canada, though Donoghue hails from Ireland she is the daughter of renowned academic and TS Eliot scholar Denis Donoghue. Donoghue has two children – Finn, now six, and Una, three – with her female partner Chris Roulston, a professor of women's studies at the University of Western Ontario. The whump Donoghue experienced on hearing Felix Fritzl's story may have had something to do with the fact that her own son was four at the time. That notion of the wide-eyed child emerging into the world like a Martian coming to Earth: it seized me.'

The newspaper reports of Felix Fritzl, aged five, emerging into a world he didn't know about, put the idea into my head. 'To say Room is based on the Fritzl case is too strong,' she says firmly. She is keen, too, to contextualise the link between her novel and the Fritzl case. I was thinking, it's not like that, but no one will know until they read it.' A lot of people made out I was writing this sinister, money-making book to exploit the grief of victims. When I meet Donoghue, halfway through a publication tour that has mushroomed thanks to her longlisting, she recalls the period as 'quite painful. Unsurprisingly, accusations of cynicism and sensationalism abounded. In the run-up to publication, however, word was that Donoghue's seventh novel would be based on the modern-day case of Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter, Elisabeth, in a basement for 24 years, raped her repeatedly and fathered her seven children – three of whom he imprisoned with her. Slammerkin, her unlikely bestseller in 2000, was spun out of a murder on the Welsh borders in 1763, while in 2006 The Sealed Letter took a notorious Victorian divorce as its grist. Until now, Donoghue's reputation had been founded on her knack for spotting historical rough diamonds and buffing them into glowing narratives. At that point, the rumblings turned into a roar. And at the end of last month, a fortnight before it was due to appear in bookshops, Room was longlisted for the Man Booker prize. First came the bidding war, eventually won in the UK by Picador then the rumours, rare these days, of an astronomical advance (the figure of €1m has been mentioned Donoghue allows only that it was 'mortifyingly large'). F or those with an ear to the ground, the rumblings about Room, Emma Donoghue's latest book, have been audible for months.

Room novel by emma donoghue