Maggie O'Farrell

Maggie O'Farrell is an award-winning novelist from Northern Ireland. She is the author of Hamnet, Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I AM, I AM, I AM, both Sunday Times no. 1 bestsellers. Her books are available in more than 30 languages.

Maggie O'Farrell was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland. The daughter of an economist, she grew up with her mother and two sisters in Wales and Scotland. She attended North Berwick High School and Brynteg Comprehensive School, then at New Hall, University of Cambridge, where she read English Literature.

O'Farrell worked as a journalist in Hong Kong and as deputy literary editor of The Independent on Sunday in London. She also taught creative writing at the University of Warwick in Coventry and Goldsmiths College in London.

Her debut novel, After You'd Gone, came out in 2000. It garnered international acclaim and won a Betty Trask Award. O'Farrell set out to create a narrative that would later evolve into the novel during a workshop organized by the Arvon Foundation in Yorkshire. Her tutors were Barbara Trapido and Elspeth Barker.

She is now the author of 9 novels and has no plans to stop. Her The Distance Between Us (2004) won a Somerset Maugham Award, and The Hand That First Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award.

She also wrote two books for children. "I’m doing it for my daughter," the novelist said.

Maggie O'Farrell lives in Edinburgh.

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