Maggie O'Farrell | |
---|---|
Born | Coleraine, County Londonderry | 27 May 1972
Occupation | Novelist |
Alma mater | New Hall, Cambridge |
Genre | Fiction, historical fiction |
Notable works |
|
Spouse | William Sutcliffe |
Children | 3 |
Website | |
maggieofarrell |
Maggie O'Farrell, RSL (born 27 May 1972), is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone , won the Betty Trask Award, [1] and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine , the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has twice been shortlisted since for the Costa Novel Award for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. [2] She appeared in the Waterstones 25 Authors for the Future. [3] Her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, [4] and the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards. [5] The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.
O'Farrell was born in Coleraine, County Londonderry, and grew up in Wales and Scotland. At the age of eight she was hospitalised with encephalitis and missed over a year of school. [6] These events are echoed in The Distance Between Us and described in her 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. [7] She suffered from a pronounced stammer during her childhood and adolescence. She was educated at North Berwick High School and Brynteg Comprehensive School, and then at New Hall, University of Cambridge (now Murray Edwards College), where she read English Literature. [8]
O'Farrell has stated that well into the 1990s, being Irish in Britain could be fraught: "We used to get endless Irish jokes, even from teachers. If I had to spell my name at school, teachers would say things like, 'Oh, are your family in the IRA?’ Teachers would say this to a 12-year-old kid in front of the whole class.... They thought it was hilarious to say, 'Ha ha, your dad's a terrorist'. It wasn't funny at all.... I wish I could say that it's [less common today] because people are less racist, but I think it's just that there are new immigrants who are getting it now." Nevertheless, not until 2013's Instructions for a Heatwave did Irish subjects become part of her work. [9]
O'Farrell worked as a journalist, both in Hong Kong and as deputy literary editor of The Independent on Sunday in London. She also taught creative writing at the University of Warwick in Coventry and Goldsmiths College in London. She has lived in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Hong Kong, and Italy. She now lives in Edinburgh.
O'Farrell's numerous successful novels, including the Costa Award-winning The Hand that First Held Mine, have received widespread critical acclaim. Her books have been translated into over 30 languages. Her novel Hamnet , based on the life of Shakespeare's family, was published in 2020. The novel makes a link between the death of eleven-year-old Hamnet and the writing of the play Hamlet. [10]
Her 2017 memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, deals with a series of near-death experiences that have occurred to her and her children. It is a memoir told non-chronologically, with each chapter headed by the name of the body part affected. [11]
In 2022, she published The Marriage Portrait, a novel based on the short life of Lucrezia de' Medici, who may or may not have been poisoned by her husband, Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara. O'Farrell has said that she got the idea for the novel after seeing Lucrezia's portrait, attributed to Agnolo Bronzino, and from reading Robert Browning's poem, "My Last Duchess", in which Lucrezia makes a brief, silent and unnamed appearance. The novel was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. [12]
O'Farrell has also written two pictures books for children, Where Snow Angels Go and The Boy Who Lost His Spark, both illustrated by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini.
O'Farrell is married to a fellow writer, William Sutcliffe, whom she met while they were students at Cambridge; they didn't become a couple, however, until ten years or so after they graduated. They live in Edinburgh with their three children. [13] [14] She has said of Sutcliffe: "Will's always been my first reader, even before we were a couple, so he's a huge influence. He's brutal but you need that." [15] One of O'Farrell's children suffers with severe allergies, the challenges of which she writes about in her memoir. [16]
This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(December 2023) |
O'Farrell was the invited castaway on the BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs on Sunday 21 March 2021.
In April 2023, the Royal Shakespeare Company's stage adaptation of Hamnet previewed at the newly opened Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. It transferred to the Garrick Theatre, London, in September 2023.
In January 2024, it was reported that Chloé Zhao was planning to adapt Hamnet for the screen alongside O'Farrell. Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley were reported as being chosen for the leading roles. [17]
In 2023 O'Farrell won the author award at Harper's Bazaar's Women of the Year awards. [18]
Year | Title | Award/Honour | Result | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|
2001 | After You'd Gone | Betty Trask Award | Won | [19] |
2005 | The Distance Between Us | Somerset Maugham Award | Won | [20] |
2010 | The Hand That First Held Mine | Costa Book Award for Fiction | Won | [21] [2] |
2013 | Instructions for a Heatwave | Costa Book Award for Fiction | Shortlist | [22] |
2016 | This Must be the Place | Costa Book Award for Fiction | Shortlist | [23] |
2018 | I Am, I Am, I Am | PEN/Ackerley Prize | Shortlist | [24] |
2020 | Hamnet | National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction | Won | [25] [26] [27] |
Women's Prize for Fiction | Won | [28] | ||
2021 | Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction | Longlist | [29] | |
Dalkey Literary Awards's Novel of the Year | Won | [30] | ||
Walter Scott Prize | Shortlist | [31] | ||
2021 | Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature | [32] | ||
2023 | The Boy Who Lost His Spark | KPMG Children's Books Ireland Awards | Won | [33] |
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel was a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories. Her first published novel, Every Day Is Mother's Day, was released in 1985. She went on to write 12 novels, two collections of short stories, a personal memoir, and numerous articles and opinion pieces.
Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist, essayist, public speaker, political scientist and activist.
Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer.
Xiaolu Guo FRSL is a Chinese-born British novelist, memoirist and film-maker, who explores migration, alienation, memory, personal journeys, feminism, translation and transnational identities.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Kate Clanchy MBE is a British poet, freelance writer and teacher.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a British writer of Scottish and Sierra Leonean ancestry. Her first book was a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest (2002). Since then she has written four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). In 2021 she published a collection of essays, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. (2021), which was a new genre for her.
NoViolet Bulawayo is the pen name of Elizabeth Zandile Tshele, a Zimbabwean author. In 2012, the National Book Foundation named her a "5 under 35" honoree. She was named one of the Top 100 most influential Africans by New African magazine in 2014. Her debut novel, We Need New Names, was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize, and her second novel, Glory, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, making her "the first Black African woman to appear on the Booker list twice".
Evelyn Rose Strange "Evie" Wyld is an Anglo-Australian author. Her first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2009, and her second novel, All the Birds, Singing, won the Encore Award in 2013 and the Miles Franklin Award in 2014. Her third novel, The Bass Rock, won the Stella Prize in 2021.
The Women's Prize for Fiction is one of the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary prizes. It is awarded annually to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom in the preceding year. A sister prize, the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, was launched in 2023.
Monique Pauline Roffey is a Trinidadian-born British writer and memoirist. Her novels have been much acclaimed, winning awards including the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, for Archipelago, and the Costa Book of the Year award, for The Mermaid of Black Conch in 2021.
Kiran Millwood Hargrave FRSL is a British poet, playwright and novelist. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Damian Leighton Barr is a Scottish writer and broadcaster. He is the creator and host of the Literary Salon, which started at Shoreditch House in 2008, and he hosts live literary events worldwide. In 2014 and 2015, he presented several editions of the BBC Radio 4 cultural programme Front Row. He has hosted several television series including Shelf Isolation and most recently The Big Scottish Book Club for BBC Scotland. He is the author of the 2013 memoir Maggie & Me, about his 1980s childhood in the west of Scotland, and the 2019 novel You Will Be Safe Here, set in South Africa in 1901 and now. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).
Diana Omo Evans FRSL is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written four full-length novels. Her first novel, 26a, published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. A House for Alice was published in 2023.
The Waterstones Book of the Year, established in 2012, is an annual award presented to a book published in the previous 12 months. Waterstones' booksellers nominate and vote to determine the winners and finalists for the prize.
Jessie Greengrass is a British author. She won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her debut short story collection.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2020.
Hamnet is a 2020 novel by Maggie O'Farrell. It is a fictional account of William Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, who died at age eleven in 1596, focusing on his parents' grief. In Canada, the novel was published under the title Hamnet & Judith.
Dara Seamus McAnulty is a Northern Irish naturalist, writer and environmental campaigner. He is the youngest ever winner of the RSPB Medal and received the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing in 2020 after being the youngest author to be shortlisted for the award.
Dominicana is a 2019 novel by Angie Cruz. It is Cruz's third novel, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction.