Maggie O'Farrell is an Irish-British novelist. Her debut novelAfter You'd Gone received international acclaim and won the Betty Trask Award. Her later novel The Hand That First Held Mine won 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. She appeared in Waterstones' 25 Authors for the Future. Her memoir I am, I am, I am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached number one in the Sunday Times Bestseller list.
Early life and career
O'Farrell was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, and grew up in Wales and Scotland. At the age of eight, she was hospitalised with encephalitis and missed over a year of school. These events are echoed in The Distance Between Us, and described in her 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. She was educated at North Berwick High School, Brynteg Comprehensive School and New Hall, Cambridge, where she read English Literature. O'Farrell has stated that, well into the 1990s, being Irish in Britain could be fraught: "We used to get endless Irish jokes, even from teachers. If I had to spell my name at school, teachers would say things like, 'Oh, are your family in the IRA?’ Teachers would say this to a 12-year-old kid in front of the whole class". "They thought it was hilarious to say, 'Ha ha, your dad’s a terrorist'. It wasn't funny at all". "I wish I could say that it’s because people are less racist, but I think it’s just that there are new immigrants who are getting it now". Nevertheless, not until 2013's Instructions for a Heatwave did Irish subjects become a part of her work. O'Farrell worked as a journalist, both in Hong Kong and as the deputy literary editor of The Independent on Sunday. She also taught creative writing at the University of Warwick in Coventry and Goldsmith's College in London.
Books
O'Farrell has written numerous successful novels, including the Costa-Award-winning The Hand that First Held Mine, and received widespread critical acclaim for all her books. Her work has been translated into over 30 languages. Her novel based around Shakespeare's family, Hamnet, was published in 2020. In 2011 she contributed the short story "How the Oak Tree Came to Life" to Why the Willow Weeps, an anthology sold to fund the work of the Woodland Trust, which planted five trees for each copy sold. Her 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen brushes with Death deals with a series of near-death experiences that affected her and her children.
Personal life
O'Farrell is married to fellow novelist William Sutcliffe, whom she met while they were students at Cambridge. They live in Edinburgh with their three children. She has described Sutcliffe as "a huge influence", saying, "Will's always been my first reader, even before we were a couple, so he's a huge influence. He's brutal but you need that".
