Maggie O'FarrellFRSL (born 1972) is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award 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. 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, the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards, and was co-adapted for the screen with Chloe Zhao in 2025. Her 2022 historical novel The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Maggie O'Farrell was born in 1972[1] in Coleraine, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Her father was an academic, and the family moved around when she was a child, so she spent her childhood in Dublin, Wales, and Scotland.[2] At the age of eight she was hospitalised with encephalitis, and missed over a year of school.[3] She was at first unable to hold a pen or a book, and was told that she would never walk again, but after two years of intensive rehabilitation, she started to walk. She says that it was this period that fostered her love of literature.[2] These events are echoed in The Distance Between Us and described in her 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am.[4]
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.[5][2] 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. It wasn't funny at all". Nevertheless, not until 2013's Instructions for a Heatwave did Irish subjects become part of her work.[6]
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.[7]
She began writing her seventh novel, This Must Be the Place, in 2013, shortly after the birth of her third child. It was published in May 2016.[2] Hannah Beckermann, writing in The Guardian, called it a "a tour de force... both technically dazzling and deeply moving... her best novel to date".[8]
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.[9]
From 2020 to 2022, O'Farrell published two pictures books for children, Where Snow Angels Go and The Boy Who Lost His Spark, both illustrated by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini.[10][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.[13]
In 2023 O'Farrell won the author award at Harper's Bazaar's Women of the Year awards.[14]
In September 2025, O'Farrell announced her next book, titled Land, set in Ireland in the aftermath of the famine.[15]
Adaptations
Hamnet
On the stage
In April 2023, the Royal Shakespeare Company's stage adaptation of Hamnet previewed at the newly opened Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.[16] It transferred to the Garrick Theatre, London, in September 2023.[16]
Film
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]Focus Features will be a creative partner on the project. Emily Watson and Joe Alwyn also joined the cast in supporting roles. Directors Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes joined on as producers for the film in August 2024, shortly after filming finished.[18]
In May 2024, Audrey Diwan was attached to direct a film adaptation of The Marriage Portrait for Element Pictures and Wildside. No further details had been announced.[23]
Personal life
O'Farrell married 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. As of 2017[update] they lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, with their three children.[24][25] 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".[26] One of O'Farrell's children suffers with severe allergies, the challenges of which she writes about in her memoir.[27]
Recognition and awards
O'Farrell appeared in Waterstones25 Authors for the Future list in 2007.[28]
↑ "20 Wintery books (for every type of reader)!". YouTube. CarolynMarieReads. 10 November 2023. (mini-review of Where Snow Angels Go with display of illustrated book from 2:09 to 2:53 in video)
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