Emma Donoghue’s novel, The Paris Express, has been longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize.

Emma is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Room sold almost three million copies, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and was 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. Haven was shortlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award. Donoghue’s fiction ranges from the contemporary (Stir-Fy, Hood, Landing, Touchy Subjects, Akin) to the historical (Learned by Heart, Slammerkin, The Sealed Letter, Astray, Frog Music) and includes two books for young readers, The Lotterys Plus One and The Lotterys More or Less.

Which authors or books inspired your book?

Trains have been associated with the books we read on them since the start, and I was very aware that The Paris Express would be my attempt to contribute to that long literary tradition.  As a Dickens fan since childhood, I tried to make The Paris Express Dickensian in the sense of ‘all human life is here’: a wide variety of characters brought together cheek by jowl, their interactions vividly analysed with an eye for gender and ethnicity as well as class. (I prefer to avoid his coincidences and melodrama, though.) Zola also had a strong influence on this novel because his La Bete Humaine is perhaps the most memorable of many great novels about railways, though it’s so luridly grim that I allowed one of my characters to make a sarky remark about it.

What advice would you have for someone struggling to make time to write?

First of all, be ruthless – whether you’re a veteran novelist or a beginner, the world is full of people who want you to do something in the next five minutes that’s not your writing, so you’re going to have to learn to say no to them.

Second of all, follow your pleasure, because it’s much easier to claim that time to write if it feels urgently exciting. Not only do I only write about things that fascinate me, but I let myself cheat on my main project with little side-pieces anytime I’m feeling even slightly restless.

What’s the last great book you read by a Canadian author?

My bookclub just read A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson and I was slowly and irresistibly drawn in to this tangled web of small-towners. Lawson is equally credible when she’s adopting the point of view of an old person or a child, and she makes you care on every page.

Did anything surprise you when writing your longlisted book?

With my fact-inspired historical fictions, there’s always a topic I have to delve into for purely practical reasons but which turns out to be a rich source of character and story as well. In the case of The Paris Express, it was the steam engine. I needed to know the basics of how the train moved… and what I discovered was that its performance absolutely depended on a tight bond between a particular driver, a particular stoker, and the particular train engine they drove every day – a sort of three-way marriage that the railway company cultivated and profited from. The engine in my novel ended up being one of the point-of-view characters, which was not something I’d anticipated!

Who’s your favourite character in your longlisted book and why?

The Paris Express has several dozen characters so I have different favourites depending on the day, but the character I found myself feeling most akin to while I was writing the novel was the senior guard or conductor on the train that day, Léon Mariette. He’s conscientious, careworn, always fretting over whether a parcel will be mislabelled or crushed, or how he’ll get all the passengers back into their carriages in time for the train to move on… so basically the guard and I have the same job, to account for every item and person and keep it all moving along.

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