AUDIO: Emma Donoghue finds child's view in Room

London, Ont.-based author Emma Donoghue says she was drawn to the child's perspective as she wrote her Man Booker Prize-nominated novel, Room.

Room is a dark fairy tale told from the point of view of a five-year-old boy who is confined with his mother in a 3.4-metre-square room padded with tiles.

"He doesn't think of it as a prison because his mother has pulled off the extraordinary trick of making him feel he has everything he needs," Donoghue told Jian Ghomeshi, host of CBC's Q cultural affairs show, in an interview Thursday.

Her book has been released in Canada this month by HarperCollins, at the same time real-life stories of kidnap victims are in the news, among them Austria's Natascha Kampusch.

There is a fascination with these figures, Donoghue said, but her own interest was the intense relationship between mother and child.

Donoghue, a Dublin-born writer who moved to Canada in 1998, said she's "thrilled" she has made it to the short list for the prestigious literary award.

"For this particular book, it could be just what it needs because many people are nervous about the subject matter, you know, a boy born into a locked room, knowing no other world," she said.

"The Booker nomination is a way of showing it's something special I'm trying to do here, there's nothing tacky or exploitive about it," she added.