Biography
Maggie O'Farrell is a novelist. Born on 27 May 1972 in Coleraine, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, she studied English literature at New Hall, University of Cambridge.
Hamnet (2020), her novel about the family of William Shakespeare, won the Women's Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. She co-wrote the screenplay for the 2025 film adaptation directed by Chloé Zhao. Her other novels include After You'd Gone (2000), which won the Betty Trask Award, and The Hand That First Held Mine (2010), winner of the Costa Novel Award. She has also written the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death (2017).
