Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma is an award-winning novelist, playwright and screenwriter, living in Canada with her family.

Some of her best known novels include ROOM, THE WONDER, THE PULL OF THE STARS and PARIS EXPRESS. Emma's work has been translated into over forty languages and earned her numerous awards.

Emma's first feature film script was her own adaptation of ROOM, got her shortlisted for an Academy Award, Golden Globe and Bafta for Best Adapted Screenplay. The Wonder (adapted from hernovel with Sebastián Lelio and Alice Birch) followed in 2022.

Emma is also an accomplished playwright with her plays being performed on both sides of the Atlantic. Her most recent play THE WIND COMING OVER THE SEA, a folk musical about Irish emigrants to Canada in the 1840s, premiered at Blyth Festival June-October 2025. Emma was commissioned to adapt her novel THE PULL OF THE STARS by Gate Theatre Dublin, where it premiered in 2024 directed by Louise Lowe. She adapted her novel Room into a play with songs (by Cora Bissett and Kathryn Joseph) which had its UK/Irish premiere in 2017 and its North American one in 2022.

Emma's first play, I Know My Own Heart (1993), was inspired by the decoded diaries of Yorkshirewoman Anne Lister, and was premiered by Dublin's Glasshouse Productions in 1993. Glasshouse and the Irish Arts Council commissioned Ladies and Gentlemen, a play with songs about vaudeville stars (including two women who got married in 1886), which premiered in 1996. Emma adapted her fairy-tale book, Kissing the Witch, which premiered at San Francisco's Magic Theatre in June 2000. Herone-act comedy Don’t Die Wondering (based on aradio play of the same name) received its world premiere at the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival in 2005. The Talk of the Town, about the Irish writer Maeve Brennan in New York in the 1950s, premiered at the 2012 Dublin Theatre Festival, directed by Annabelle Comyn in collaboration with HATCH Theatre Company, Landmark Productions and the Dublin Theatre Festival.