‘All the books you write change you’: Maggie O’Farrell on Hamnet, Hollywood and family secrets

To say 2026 has been a whirlwind for Maggie O’Farrell would be an understatement. It kicked off with the release of the screen version of her beloved novel about Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, the screenplay for which she co-wrote with director Chloé Zhao. Having thought the book unfilmable – Zhao had to persuade her to adapt it – she was “genuinely surprised” when the movie, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal as Agnes and Will Shakespeare, became a huge critical and financial success. Taking more than $108m at the global box office, it went on to become an awards-season juggernaut with a slew of nominations. Jessie Buckley – O’Farrell’s “dream Agnes” – took home the best actress award at the Oscars, the Golden Globes and the Baftas, and the film won Best Picture awards at the latter two events. The author is only just catching her breath.

“It’s all been quite surreal,” she says on a video call from her home in Edinburgh. “It’s hard to really describe quite how strange it’s been.”

Her 2022 novel The Marriage Portrait, set in renaissance Italy, is soon to be filmed by the French director Audrey Diwan. And O’Farrell’s latest book, Land, out today, has already been optioned for the screen by the producer of Hamnet, Liza Marshall.  

It’s an epic, sweeping story, inspired by her own family history and set on a windswept peninsula on the west coast of Ireland in 1865, not long after the Great Hunger. Against a backdrop of family tragedy and colonial tensions, it follows Tomás and his 10-year-old son Liam as they work for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole country after the devastation wreaked by the famine. Ireland’s Celtic mythology and folkloric tradition underpin the narrative, and the Catholic church looms large.

O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, in 1972. The family moved to south Wales when she was two years old and later to Scotland. She spent her childhood summers in Dublin and on the west coast of Ireland. After reading English at Cambridge, she became a journalist on the Independent on Sunday before publishing her first novel, After You’d Gone, at the age of 28. O’Farrell has lived in Edinburgh for 16 years with her husband, the author-turned-psychotherapist Will Sutcliffe, and their three children.

Despite the glittering prizes of the past six months, O’Farrell feels “quite nervous” about Land – her 10th novel – going out into the world: “It’s always the same with a new book: I get gripped by anxiety.”

It’s been percolating for years. I’d been wanting to find out more about my great-great-grandfather, Tomás in the book, who we were told as children had worked for the Ordnance Survey in the 19th century in Ireland. Every time I was in Dublin, I'd go to the archives and poke around to see what I could find but there wasn’t much because if you were Irish working for the OS at that time, you weren’t allowed to sign your work. Then, in my parents’ house in Scotland, we had a hand‑drawn map that we knew was made by his son, my great‑grandfather, Liam in the book, who initially abandoned mapmaking to join the Jesuits but then turned his back on the order to return to charting the land. 

I must have walked past that map thousands of times, then one day I picked up a magnifying glass and examined it properly. In the corner there was a miniature portrait, invisible to the naked eye, of my great‑great‑grandfather, standing behind a red‑coated British soldier, looking through a theodolite. It was electrifying – he had been hiding in plain sight. The fact that Liam put the portrait there and hid it away fascinated me. What did that say about the father-son dynamic? And the portrait was politically loaded. That kind of thing is catnip to a novelist.

It was, but I couldn’t work out how to make it into fiction. It just felt like a set of interesting facts. Then, on a train from Belfast to Dublin, the first sentence came to me: “His father was ever a man of few words.” Suddenly, I could see the whole structure. On that journey I wrote the outline of the entire book.

I wanted readers to feel a sense of rootlessness. It’s almost impossible for us to imagine a time before uniform maps, especially now we all have GPS. I wanted to take readers back to when you navigated by the stars, memory and stories. And I wanted it to feel universal – a general meditation on colonisation and occupation.

Very important: it’s kind of central to who I am. But here I am with my British accent. I think if you don’t grow up where you were born, you always have a kind of ghost-self inside you. I feel quite Irish in Britain, and in Ireland I feel quite British.

I didn't find it easy at all. I was born in Derry four months after Bloody Sunday – a very dark chapter in the city’s history. When we moved here, relations between Britain and Ireland were incredibly fraught. At the thin end of the wedge there were constant Irish jokes, in which the Irish person was always thick or hapless. At the other end, teachers used to make allusions to the IRA, and one teacher even used to ask me if my parents were in the IRA. I remember in the 90s, working in an office in London, coming back to my desk one day and colleagues were laughing, and they said: “Oh it’s so funny, whenever your dad rings, we think he’s about to give us a five‑minute warning.” Attitudes have changed, but I think there are new waves of immigrants who are absorbing that kind of hostility now.

If you're a writer, it's always interesting to dip a toe into another world and see people living this life that you know nothing about. Observing the Hollywood machine up close, the logistics, the organisation, was eye‑opening. But it was quite nice to come back. The whole thing now feels like it almost didn't happen, as if it was some kind of surreal dream.

Having my own hair and makeup artist, for a start. And at the Golden Globes or the Oscars, looking around and realising everyone is someone that you’ve seen on screen for years. You get odd moments of cognitive dissonance. I remember at the Golden Globes hearing someone behind me and thinking: “That man sounds exactly like George Clooney.” And then thinking, oh yes, that’s because it is George Clooney.

My God, no, I had no idea. I think I'd have been too frightened if I’d have known. Also, it launched in March 2020, just when we went into lockdown. There’d been a book tour planned, and a launch party, all cancelled. I remember my agent phoning up and saying, you know, it's going to be hard, we’re going to have to take this on the chin. I thought, oh God, this book that I loved and laboured on – it’s going to sink without trace. But that didn't happen.

 I think all the books you write change you. Each one marks a stage of your life, your interests, your obsessions and absorptions at that time.

In a little studio in my garden with no internet. It’s really important to protect your writing time.

The most important thing for me would be to tackle the huge problems of Britain, which are inequality, poverty and racism. And I think you need to tackle them at their roots, rather than just trying to plaster over the cracks.

So many things. My children, my cats, swimming, going for long walks, travelling, good food, friends – nothing earth-shattering.

I’m from the generation where you just call it “swimming”! So yes, in the sea near Edinburgh. 

That I knew nothing at 18. And that nothing lasts. Whatever problems you are facing, they will pass. Everything may seem permanent and disastrous, but actually life is a continuum, and everything will resolve itself.

 It’s quite tentative but I have something I am thinking about.

 Land is published today by Tinder Press, £25