Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell was born in 1972 in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, and spent her childhood moving between Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Her early years were marked by a near-fatal illness at age eight — a viral encephalitis that left her temporarily unable to walk or talk, and which she has described as a formative encounter with mortality that infuses all her subsequent fiction. She studied English at Cambridge University and worked as a journalist and arts editor before turning to fiction full time. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband, the novelist William Sutcliffe, and their three children.

O’Farrell published her debut novel, After You’d Gone, in 2000. Over the following two decades she produced a body of work notable for its emotional intensity, its formal inventiveness — she rarely writes the same kind of book twice — and its sustained interest in grief, loss, and the invisible architecture of family life. Novels including My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (which won the Costa Novel Award), Instructions for a Heatwave, and This Must Be the Place established her as one of the most important British novelists of her generation.

Hamnet (2020), available on WritersReview, is widely regarded as her masterpiece. The novel imagines the life of Agnes, wife of a young glover’s apprentice who will become the most famous playwright in the English language — though Shakespeare himself is never named. At its center is the devastating loss of the couple’s eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, from bubonic plague in 1596. O’Farrell renders sixteenth-century Stratford with extraordinary sensory vividness — the smells of tallow and herbs, the weight of grief, the texture of daily life — and the novel’s final movement, in which Agnes attends a performance of the play that bears her son’s name, is among the most emotionally powerful passages in recent British fiction.

Hamnet won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020 and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2021. It was a number one bestseller in the UK and Ireland, and was translated into more than forty languages. Critics praised O’Farrell’s ability to make a historical novel feel urgently present, to ground sweeping themes of loss and art in the granular reality of embodied life. A stage adaptation by Lolita Chakrabarti toured major theatres in the UK and opened on Broadway.

O’Farrell is also the author of a celebrated memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am (2017), which recounts seventeen brushes with death across her lifetime and was a major bestseller. Her subsequent novel, The Marriage Portrait (2022), returned to the historical mode of Hamnet, imagining the inner life of Lucrezia de’ Medici, the young noblewoman believed to be the subject of Robert Browning’s poem ‘My Last Duchess.’ O’Farrell’s career is defined by formal restlessness, emotional courage, and an ability to locate the universal in the intensely particular.