Maggie O'Farrell

Maggie O'Farrell FRSL (born 1972) is an Irish-British novelist. The family moved a number of times when she was a child, spending her childhood in Dublin and Wales, before settling in Scotland. 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 this period fostered her love of literature.

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.

Early career O'Farrell worked as a journalist, first for a computer magazine in Hong Kong,

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. Hannah Beckermann, writing in The Guardian, called it a "a tour de force... both technically dazzling and deeply moving... her best novel to date".

Her 2017 memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, deals with a series of near-death experiences that have happened to her or her children. It is a memoir told non-chronologically, with each chapter headed by the name of the body part affected.

From 2020 to 2022, O'Farrell published two picture books for children, Where Snow Angels Go and The Boy Who Lost His Spark, both illustrated by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini.

O'Farrell was invited as the castaway on the BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs in March 2021.

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.

In May 2022, during the close of the Stratford Literary Festival, O'Farrell planted two European mountain ash trees and memorial plaques at the graveyard in Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-upon-Avon for Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare, who had not had a visible memorial since their deaths in the 16th century.

In 2023 O'Farrell won the author award at Harper's Bazaars Women of the Year awards.

In September 2025, O'Farrell announced her next book, titled Land, set in Ireland in the aftermath of the 1840s famine. It was published in June 2026.

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. It transferred to the Garrick Theatre, London, in September 2023. 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.

Hamnet world premiered at the 52nd Telluride Film Festival to rave reviews. The film then went to the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the highly coveted People's Choice Award. The film had a limited theatrical release in the United States on November 27 before expanding nationwide December 12. The film was released in the UK on January 9.

In 2026, the film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama.

The Marriage Portrait In May 2024, Audrey Diwan was attached to direct a film adaptation of The Marriage Portrait for Element Pictures and Wildside. No further details have been announced.

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 about ten years after they graduated. , they lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, with their three children. 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". One of O'Farrell's children suffers with severe allergies, the challenges of which she writes about in her memoir.

Recognition and awards O'Farrell appeared in Waterstones' 25 Authors for the Future list in 2007.

In July 2021 she was announced as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL).

In 2026 O'Farrell was nominated, along with Chloé Zhao, for Best Adapted Screenplay in the Academy Awards for the film Hamnet. They would eventually win Best Script at the Irish Film & Television Awards.

Literary awards