Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell is a Northern Irish-born novelist and bestselling author known for psychologically perceptive fiction about family, memory, identity and loss. Her novels often move between different periods and viewpoints, gradually revealing how private decisions and concealed histories shape the lives of her characters. Her earlier works include After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Instructions for a Heatwave and The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award.

O’Farrell achieved major international success with Hamnet, an imaginative account of the death of William Shakespeare’s young son and its effect on his family. The novel won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and became a number-one bestseller. She followed it with The Marriage Portrait, which reconstructs the short life of Lucrezia de’ Medici within the dangerous court politics of Renaissance Italy. Her historical fiction is distinguished by lyrical prose, intimate characterisation and a strong interest in women whose experiences survive only imperfectly in the historical record.