Maggie O’Farrell was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and grew up between Wales and Scotland, and that unsettled geography runs quietly beneath everything she writes. Her first novel, After You’d Gone, took the Betty Trask Award; The Hand That First Held Mine won the Costa Novel Award in 2010; and Hamnet, her imagining of the short life of Shakespeare’s son, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020.
She is a novelist of the body and of the interrupted moment. Her sentences are short-breathed and sensory, and her plots turn on illness, accident and the near miss, a preoccupation she made explicit in the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, which set out seventeen brushes with death and went straight to the top of the Sunday Times list.
Recognition has kept arriving. Hamnet also took the fiction prize at the National Book Critics Circle Awards, and O’Farrell later co-adapted it for the screen with Chloe Zhao, work that brought her an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she remains one of the few writers equally trusted with a period setting and a contemporary marriage.
16 hours and 47 minutes
