About
Maggie O’Farrell is an award-winning British-Irish novelist born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, in 1972. She grew up partly in Wales and Scotland and later studied English literature at the University of Cambridge. Before becoming a full-time novelist, she worked as a journalist and literary editor in Hong Kong and London. Her debut novel, After You’d Gone (2000), won the Betty Trask Award and established her reputation for emotionally intricate storytelling. She went on to write several acclaimed novels, including The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006), The Hand That First Held Mine (2010), which won the Costa Novel Award, and This Must Be the Place (2016). Her international breakthrough came with Hamnet (2020), a fictionalised account of the life and death of William Shakespeare’s son. The novel won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her subsequent novel, The Marriage Portrait (2022), explores the life of Lucrezia de’ Medici in Renaissance Italy. O’Farrell is also the author of the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death (2017), in which she recounts seventeen encounters with mortality. Her writing frequently explores family, grief, historical memory, and the inner lives of women. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
