Maggie O'Farrell

Biography

Maggie O'Farrell FRSL (born 1972) is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has twice been shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. Her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards, and was co-adapted for the screen with Chloe Zhao in 2025. Her 2022 historical novel, The Marriage Portrait, was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.