Maggie O'Farrell

Born in Northern Ireland, Maggie O’Farrell grew up in Wales and Scotland, where she faced discrimination because of her Irish heritage. At eight years old, she missed over a year of school while hospitalized with encephalitis, an event she revisits in her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death (2017). O’Farrell studied English literature at New Hall, University of Cambridge, where she met her eventual husband, writer William Sutcliffe. She has worked as a journalist and literary editor, in addition to teaching creative writing at the University of Warwick in Coventry and Goldsmiths College in London. The majority of O’Farrell’s work can be characterized as historical fiction, including her novel Hamnet (2020), a fictionalized account of William Shakespeare’s family life, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Awards for fiction in 2020. Other honors include the Betty Trask Award, given to her debut novel After You’d Gone (2000), and the Costa Novel Award, awarded to The Hand That First Held Mine (2010). The Marriage Portrait (2022) was shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction. O’Farrell lives in Edinburgh with her husband and three children. Having struggled with a stammer since her youth, O’Farrell finds freedom in writing.