Donovan attracted immediate critical acclaim with his debut novel Schopenhauer's Telescope, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2003,[3] and which won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award in 2004.[4] His subsequent novels include Doctor Salt (2005), Julius Winsome (2006), and Sunless (2007). However, Sunless is essentially a rewritten version of Doctor Salt—ultimately very different from the earlier novel, but built upon the same basic narrative elements—of which Donovan has said: "Doctor Salt... was a first draft of Sunless. I wrote [Doctor Salt] too fast, and the sense I was after just wasn't in the novel. ... I saw the chance to write the real novel, if you like, [when Doctor Salt was due to be published in the United States in 2007] and this I hope I've done in Sunless."[5]
Before writing prose, Donovan published three collections of poetry: Columbus Rides Again (1992), Kings and Bicycles (1995), and The Lighthouse (2000).[6] His next publication was Young Irelanders (2008) - a collection of short stories set in Ireland. He was said to be working on a novel set in early twentieth-century Europe.[7]
