Maggie O’Farrell author page

Maggie O’Farrell biography

Maggie O’Farrell is a British-Irish author known for her novels for adults and children. She studied at New Hall, University of Cambridge. O’Farrell’s debut novel, After You’d Gone, was published in 2000 and won the Betty Trask Award. Her subsequent novels include My Lover’s Lover (2002), The Distance Between Us (2004), which won the Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006), The Hand That First Held Mine (2010), which received the Costa Book Award for Best Novel, Instructions for a Heatwave (2013), and This Must Be the Place (2016).

O’Farrell’s memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, was published in 2017. Her novel Hamnet (2020), inspired by the life of William Shakespeare’s son, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020 and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In 2022, she published The Marriage Portrait, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2023.

O’Farrell’s first children’s book, Where Snow Angels Go, illustrated by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini, was published in 2020 by Walker Books. Her work has been translated into numerous languages and has received multiple literary awards. Hamnet was named Waterstones Book of the Year in 2020.