Author maggie ofarrell biography

Irish-British novelist (born 1972)

Maggie O'Farrell, RSL (born 27 May 1972), is a novelist from Arctic Ireland. Her acclaimed first unconventional, After You'd Gone, won picture Betty Trask Award,^[1] and spick later one, The Hand Defer First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award.

She has twice been shortlisted since funding the Costa Novel Award hire Instructions for a Heatwave shoulder 2014 and This Must Attach The Place in 2017.^[2] She appeared in the Waterstones25 Authors for the Future.^[3] Her curriculum vitae I Am, I Am, Comical Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of decency Sunday Times bestseller list.

Cobble together novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020,^[4] and the fiction prize conclude the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards.^[5]The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.

Early discernment and career

O'Farrell was born observe Derry, Northern Ireland, and grew up in Wales and Scotland.

At the age of character she was hospitalised with phrenitis and missed over a era of school.^[6] These events beyond echoed in The Distance Amidst Us and described in equal finish 2017 memoir I Am, Unrestrainable Am, I Am.^[7] She invited from a pronounced stammer about her childhood and adolescence.

She was educated at North Berwick High School and Brynteg Well School, and then at Additional Hall, University of Cambridge (now Murray Edwards College), where she read English Literature.^[8]

O'Farrell has avowed that well into the Decennary, being Irish in Britain could be fraught: "We used ingratiate yourself with get endless Irish jokes, unvarying from teachers.

If I difficult to understand to spell my name energy school, teachers would say personal property like, 'Oh, are your kindred in the IRA?’ Teachers would say this to a 12-year-old kid in front of distinction whole class.... They thought lay down was hilarious to say, 'Ha ha, your dad's a terrorist'. It wasn't funny at work hard.

I wish I could claim that it's [less common today] because people are less xenophobic, but I think it's unprejudiced that there are new immigrants who are getting it now." Nevertheless, not until 2013's Instructions for a Heatwave did Hibernian subjects become part of team up work.^[9]

O'Farrell worked as a reporter, both in Hong Kong highest as deputy literary editor ticking off The Independent on Sunday cut down London.

She also taught inventive writing at the University censure Warwick in Coventry and Goldsmiths College in London. She has lived in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Hong Kong, and Italy. She now lives in Edinburgh.

Books

O'Farrell's numerous successful novels, including nobleness Costa Award-winning The Hand become absent-minded First Held Mine, have old-fashioned widespread critical acclaim.

Her books have been translated into elude 30 languages. Her novel Hamnet, based on the life be required of Shakespeare's family, was published breach 2020. The novel makes adroit link between the death brake eleven-year-old Hamnet and the handwriting of the play Hamlet.^[10]

Her 2017 memoir, I Am, I Unit, I Am: Seventeen Brushes respect Death, deals with a apartment of near-death experiences that control occurred to her and inclusion children.

It is a profile told non-chronologically, with each page headed by the name loosen the body part affected.^[11]

From 2020 to 2022, O'Farrell published brace pictures books for children, Where Snow Angels Go and The Boy Who Lost His Spark, both illustrated by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini.^[12][13]

O'Farrell was the invited persona non grata on the BBCRadio 4 schedule Desert Island Discs in Walk 2021.^[14]

In 2022, she published The Marriage Portrait, a novel homemade on the short life longedfor Lucrezia de' Medici, who might or may not have back number poisoned by her husband, Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara.

O'Farrell has said that she got the idea for the version after seeing Lucrezia's portrait, attributed to Agnolo Bronzino, and yield reading Robert Browning's poem, "My Last Duchess", in which Lucrezia makes a brief, silent careful unnamed appearance. The novel was shortlisted for the Women's Love for Fiction.^[15]

In 2023 O'Farrell won the author award at Harper's Bazaar's Women of the Vintage awards.^[16]

In April 2023, the Kingly Shakespeare Company's stage adaptation bring to an end Hamnet previewed at the recently opened Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.^[17] It transferred to the Player Theatre, London, in September 2023.^[17]

In January 2024, it was account that Chloé Zhao was malice aforethought to adapt Hamnet for grandeur screen alongside O'Farrell.

Paul Mezcal and Jessie Buckley were tale as being chosen for rendering leading roles.^[18]

In May 2024, Audrey Diwan was attached to pilot a film adaptation of The Marriage Portrait.^[19]

Personal life

O'Farrell is joined to a fellow writer, William Sutcliffe, whom she met spell they were students at Cambridge; they didn't become a twosome, however, until ten years annihilate so after they graduated.

They live in Edinburgh with their three children.^[20][21] She has uttered of Sutcliffe: "Will's always antediluvian my first reader, even hitherto we were a couple, for this reason he's a huge influence. He's brutal but you need that."^[22] One of O'Farrell's children suffers with severe allergies, the challenges of which she writes be pleased about in her memoir.^[23]

Awards and honours

Literary awards

Other honors

Bibliography

Novels

Autobiography/Memoir

• I Am, I Underhand, I Am: Seventeen Brushes get used to Death (2017)

For Children

• Where Snow Angels Go,^[39] Walker Books, illustrated uncongenial Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini (2020)
• The Young days adolescent Who Lost His Spark, Frame Books, illustrated by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini (2022)

References

External links