WOMEN of the YEAR
WRITER
She has long enchanted readers with her vividly painted worlds and luminous prose, but it was the release of the author’s Shakespeare-inspired novel Hamnet – recently adapted for the stage and soon to become a film – that propelled her to new heights of literary fame
‘IT’S LIKE WINNING A HUNDRED LOTTERIES,’ SAYS MAGGIE O’FARRELL of the runaway success of her novel Hamnet, which was published in 2020 to critical acclaim and a rapturous reader response. A fictionalised account of the short life of Shakespeare’s son (the eponymous Hamnet) and his mother Agnes, the name Anne Hathaway’s father used in his will, the book is a richly imagined take on an untold chapter of history and has become a bestseller around the world.
Hamnet was not, of course, O’Farrell’s first garlanded literary venture: the Northern Ireland-born writer’s illustrious career, which dates back to her brilliant 2000 debut, After You’ d Gone, has seen her win numerous awards, notably for her gripping 2004 family saga The Distance Between Us and her extraordinarily moving 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. But it was her foray into Shakespearean apocrypha that catapulted her into the literary stratosphere.
O’Farrell laughs when I ask her how her life has changed since the book’s publication. At first, she tells me, she wasn’t aware of quite how well it had been received by readers, since it was released in the midst of the pandemic, when in-person events were not allowed. ‘Everything was on Zoom, so I had no idea how many people I was talking to or what people were thinking or saying. I was essentially talking to one person,’ she says. ‘That’s what it felt like, anyway!’ When she realised the novel had become a cult classic, she was astonished. ‘I see it as an incredible stroke of luck – you have to look at it that way. You can’t think of it as part of some trajectory: it’s a blip, and then you carry on.’
She is being modest: her trajectory from here can only be upwards. This year, the Royal Shakespeare Company brought Hamnet to the stage, with a script by Lolita Chakrabarti (who adapted Life of Pi in 2021); the play captivated audiences during a sold-out run in Stratford, before transferring to London’s Garrick Theatre in September. ‘It’s been the most amazing project,’ O’Farrell says. ‘I can’t even say it was a dream come true – because it had never entered my mind as a possibility.’ She and Chakrabarti worked closely together to translate the story from page to stage. ‘We had a lot of back and forth,’ she says. ‘Sometimes it was about narrative and structure, sometimes about historical context. She did a remarkable job of disassembling the book, because it’s quite interior and moves about a lot in time.’ Next, Hamnet is set for the silver screen: O’Farrell is co-writing a film ad
