They say that writing is a solitary pursuit. But, from the outside at least, Maggie O’Farrell’s year has been a haze of red carpets, transatlantic flights and glittering awards for the Hollywood adaptation of her bestselling novel Hamnet.
“The whole thing was such a surreal experience,” O’Farrell tells me from her home in Edinburgh. “When I look back now at going to the various awards ceremonies, it was like it didn’t really happen, like some strange dream.” She begins to laugh. “The other day I was going through my wardrobe to find something and I came across the dress that I wore to the Oscars and I thought” – she mimes an expression of abject bewilderment – “‘What’s that?!’”
The 53-year-old author is speaking to me in her yoga clothes, sitting at what she tells me is a Sellotape- and school permission form-strewn “admin desk” – she writes elsewhere, in an internet-free hut in the garden. Her bright copper curls frame the oversized, thick-rimmed black glasses she is wearing.
Hamnet, her fictionalised account of the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, is one of the standout books of the decade so far – beautiful, immersive and devastating. It has sold over two million copies, been translated into 40 languages and won both the 2020 Women’s Prize for fiction, and the Waterstones Book of the Year. Originally, O’Farrell was reluctant to work on the screenplay, but when Nomadland’s Chloe Zhao came on board to direct in 2023, O’Farrell was persuaded to write the script with her. Probably in large part because of this, the film feels wonderfully true to the soul of the novel – a haunting, gorgeously shot paean to nature and motherhood and the love that endures through loss.
Jessie Buckley won an Oscar in February for her tender portrayal of Hamnet’s mother, Agnes, usually known as Anne Hathaway, while the film sees Paul Mescal scribbling away with a quill as Shakespeare. It may have been criticised for the ferocity of the audience sobbing screenings generated (there were debates over whether it was “grief porn”). But O’Farrell’s work over her near 30-year career has always looked at traumatic subjects with a candour that feels liberating. In 2022’s The Marriage Portrait she imagined the life of a child bride; in 2006’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox she probed the dark history of silencing women through psychiatry.
Jessie Buckley won an Oscar for her role as Agnes in the adaptation of ‘Hamnet’ for the big screen (Photo: Focus Features)
She won a Bafta and a Golden Globe for her work on the Hamnet film, with Zhao and the film’s team, and was nominated for an Oscar with Zhao for the screenplay. “There are things that you think about in life,” she says. “You think, ‘It would be great if one day I could do that,’ but going to the Oscars was never something I thought of. It was like saying, ‘One day I really hope I will become an Olympic skier.’”
During awards season, I enjoyed seeing what red carpet outfit O’Farrell would come up with next. In her series of colourful, literary-themed ensembles (see her quill headpiece at the Baftas) she looked like she was having a much better time than many of the celebrities. For actors and performers, she says, the red carpet “is actually a necessary part of the job, it’s a lot of where you get work I think, and obviously that’s not the case for me. So I thought, ‘I’m just going to enjoy it’.”
Her fuchsia pink satin gown at the Oscars was “a very joint decision between my daughters and my friends” – she has three children, a son in his early twenties and teenage daughters, with the author turned psychotherapist William Sutcliffe. She refused the stylist she was offered for the ceremony. “It would just be very peculiar. I don’t think anyone else has chosen my clothes for me since I was probably about five.”
What was it like being photographed alongside the likes of Mescal and Buckley? She gives a wry laugh. “When you go to something like the Oscars you realise that the people everybody wants to look at… it’s really not a middle-aged writer. Obviously everybody wants to look at the star and I’m completely happy with that. I would really not want the level of fame that some people at the Oscars have, not at all. To me it looks like a very unenviable state.
“So, you know, you go and you walk the red carpet and they say to you, ‘Stand here,’ and they take photographs. What happens if you’re a middle-aged writer is you stand there slightly awkwardly and the photographer will just think, ‘Who the hell is she?’”
O’Farrell at the Baftas in February, where ‘Hamnet’ won the Outstanding British Film award (Photo: Iona Wolff/Bafta/Getty)
O’Farrell’s life has moved on from all this – but it hasn’t exactly calmed down. She is about to publish her 10th novel, Land, which is about the family of a mapmaker living in the shadow of the Great Famine, which blighted Ireland from 1845 to 1852. Taking in migration, colonisation, Britain’s imperial past and the environment, it speaks to today’s world as well as immersing readers in 19th century life on the west coast of Ireland, when the island was under British rule.
Land was inspired, in part, by O’Farrell’s great-great grandfather. It had always been a myth in her family that he had worked on an early map of Ireland, but she didn’t know the details. Researching the novel, she discovered he had been a labourer for the Ordnance Survey in 19th century Ireland. He was difficult to find in the records, she says, “because, if you were Irish and you worked for the Ordnance Survey, which was run mostly by the British army, you weren’t allowed to sign your own work, it had to be signed by a British army officer.”
The date when he was working, “at the tail end of the famine”, caught her attention. Ireland, she says, “had undergone a cataclysmic change. It had lost a third of its population both from death by starvation and forced eviction, forced emigration.”
While stressing that there were complex reasons behind the tragedy, “centuries of occupation and colonisation also contributed to it”, she says. Charles Trevelyan, the British government official in charge of famine relief, she continues, “described the Great Famine as an ‘act of God’. A punishment for an ‘idle, ungrateful, un self-reliant people’.” A year after he wrote the letter containing these words, he was knighted. “For me that tiny nugget tells you all you need to know about the attitude of the British government,” she says with a bitter smile.
O’Farrell doesn’t shy away from portraying the terrors of the period. We see one young girl left alone in a house surrounded by her dead relatives; a boy forced to bury his father. “I had such a huge amount of vertigo at the prospect of writing about the Great Famine,” O’Farrrell says. “Much more so than I had at the prospect of writing a novel about Shakespeare.
“I think if you’re going to write about it, you have to write about it properly, you’ve got to write about it from a very informed standpoint. So, yes it was hard, because it’s just – the realities of it. You can read a million people died of starvation-related diseases – that’s probably a conservative estimate. But when you actually read the details, it’s so sickening and so horrifying.”
O’Farrell was born in Derry in 1972, four or five months after Bloody Sunday. Her dad was from Dublin and her mum had been born in the North of England, though her maternal line was from Northern Ireland. The family moved around between nearby towns for a couple of years until her father was offered a job in Cardiff, which took the family to South Wales. They remained there for a decade, before moving to Scotland.
What was it like growing up with an Irish surname in mainland UK during the Troubles? “It was hard,” she says. “The thin end of the wedge is we used to get constant Irish jokes – ‘Thick paddies’, where the Irishman is always stupid. I think people thought they were funny but actually they really weren’t. It was quite wearing.”
She sighs. “And the other end of the wedge was that I had people – parents [of peers], friends, teachers – who would just insinuate or ask if my family were in the IRA or if my parents planted bombs. Or, you know, why didn’t I come to school in a balaclava?” She’s talking so calmly, the horror of this takes a few seconds to land. “Yeah, a lot of that,” she says.
How did it make her feel? “I mean, we kind of got inured to it. I just had to keep my head down. But it was really hard when it was adults saying that to you when you’re a child. When I think about that now it’s absolutely horrifying: a teacher basically asking a child if their parents were terrorists. I hope in this day and age there are strong laws about saying that kind of thing to a child.”
O’Farrell spent most of her childhood summers in the west of Ireland, where Land is set. How would she describe her Irish identity today? “It’s complicated. I love going to Ireland and I feel instantly at home and I love hearing the accents and I love not having to spell my surname constantly. But at the same time I’m very aware the way I talk instantly identifies me as somebody who isn’t [someone who grew up in Ireland].”
Land has been bought by Hamnet film producer Liza Marshall, with the potential of adapting it for screen. Would she do anything differently were she involved in the project this time round? It sounds like she’d want a very similar experience. “I think what it brought home to me with Hamnet was how incredibly lucky I was to have such superlative collaborators on the project, and I think that is so important,” she says. “Chloe was the perfect person to direct and the cast, they were absolutely spot on.”
“The kind of atmosphere that Chloe fosters on set is very, very communal and inclusive. She listens to other people, you know, listens to all sorts of people’s opinions. I think the happy atmosphere on set makes for a good film.”
It’s good to hear O’Farrell has got a garden studio to write in now, rather than working in her daughter’s Wendy house, as she did in lockdown (“I thought, ‘I like this, but ergonomically this is not going to work long term’”). Has she bought herself anything specific to celebrate Hamnet’s continuing success?
“That’s a point, have I?” There’s a pause. “I’ll tell you what I did do. When I was in LA, I went to the Oscars with my very long-term friend and agent Victoria [Hobbs], but we were slightly jetlagged. In Venice Beach the day before the Oscars we saw a place that was doing permanent jewellery, so we both got permanent matching anklets”. This is jewellery that is custom fitted to you, the ends of a chain melded together to fit your body.
“It was quite mad,” says O’Farrell, but then her eyes crinkle with amusement. “I thought, ‘Why not?’ When you’re in your fifties you have to do these things.”
‘Land’ is published by Tinder Press on 2 June, £25
