Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell was born in 1972 in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, and grew up in Wales and Scotland following her family’s moves—an itinerant early life that gave her an outsider’s sensitivity to place and belonging that marks much of her fiction. She studied English at Girton College, Cambridge, and then worked as a journalist and deputy literary editor at The Independent on Sunday before turning her full attention to fiction. She has spoken about a near-death experience as a child—a serious illness that brought her close to dying—as formative for her consciousness as a writer, giving her a particular attention to the fragility of life and the moment-to-moment reality of embodied existence. 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, to considerable critical acclaim, and has published six further novels at regular intervals, each distinct in setting and approach but unified by an exceptional attentiveness to psychological interiority, a gift for structuring narratives around mysteries that unravel gradually across time, and a prose style of unusual richness and precision. She also published a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death (2017), in which she recounts the seventeen near-death experiences of her life—an extraordinary document of attention and survival.

Hamnet (2020), available on Writers Review, is widely regarded as O’Farrell’s masterpiece and one of the finest English-language novels of the past decade. The novel imagines the life of Agnes (the historical Anne Hathaway, wife of William Shakespeare) and the death of her and Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son Hamnet from bubonic plague in 1596—the event that preceded and possibly inspired Shakespeare’s writing of Hamlet. The novel is a work of historical imagination of the highest order: scrupulously researched, deeply embodied, and written in a prose that is simultaneously precise and incantatory. O’Farrell is particularly extraordinary in her rendering of Agnes—a woman history has almost entirely obscured—as a fully realized, complex, and magnificent human being: herbalist, healer, lover, and mother. The novel won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020 and has been translated into dozens of languages.

O’Farrell’s prose style is one of the most distinctive in contemporary British fiction: sensory and specific, organized around carefully chosen concrete details that accumulate into a vivid totality. She is particularly gifted at inhabiting the minds and bodies of her characters—at rendering the specific textures of historical life without the anachronisms that can mar historical fiction—and at sustaining emotional intensity over long narrative distances. Hamnet in particular achieves a rare quality: it makes the reader grieve, at novel’s end, as if for a person actually known.

Maggie O’Farrell is one of the most important and consistently accomplished novelists working in Britain today. Her career—marked by steady growth, formal risk-taking, and an unfailing commitment to the highest literary standards—represents the best kind of literary vocation. Her influence on a generation of historical novelists interested in recovering the voices of women from historical obscurity has been considerable, and her books continue to find new readers with each passing year.