Maggie O'Farrell explains how survival shaped her creative choices and how Hamnet's success has led to a new, historically charged novel, Land
Maggie O’Farrell has moved from page to screen and back again, carrying a preoccupation with fragility that has threaded through her work. The bestselling author, now in her fifties, first set out the personal roots of that preoccupation in her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, and later explored loss and family in the novel Hamnet.
The book’s screen adaptation brought mainstream attention to her writing life: awards, nominations and the practical lessons of translating intimate fiction into film.
Her new novel, Land, is a multigenerational story rooted in Ireland and in the historical task of mapping the country.
That novel — inspired by a family connection to the Ordnance Survey work of the mid-19th century — marks a shift toward explicitly political themes for O’Farrell, while also continuing her interest in how private grief and public history intersect.
Living with mortality: the stories that shaped a writer
O’Farrell has been candid about how early health crises reframed her life outlook. In her memoir she chronicles multiple episodes now described as near-death experiences, including a childhood bout of encephalitis that left her wheelchair-bound for a year. Those episodes, and a later scare involving a child with severe allergies, have affected the pace and priorities of her life: she has spoken of a practical impulse to “say yes” and to pack experiences into a shorter time.
From personal risk to professional risks
That impulse helps explain why O’Farrell took on screenwriting when offered the chance to adapt Hamnet. Approaching her fiftieth birthday, she decided to push beyond the familiar and learn a different craft. The move paid creative dividends: the film, directed by Chloé Zhao and anchored by performances from Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, brought awards attention—Jessie Buckley won an Oscar—and O’Farrell herself has collected major industry recognition, including wins and nominations across high-profile ceremonies.
Hamnet on screen: collaboration and acclaim
The cinematic Hamnet grew from O’Farrell’s novel into a large collaborative enterprise, drawing established filmmakers to adapt the tale of a family confronting sudden loss. The production recreated historical performance spaces and enlisted a notable creative team to realise the book’s textures on screen. Financially and critically the adaptation resonated: it reached broad audiences globally and returned strong box-office results while amplifying the novel’s themes of grief and small domestic acts that ripple outward.
The oddities of awards season
O’Farrell has described the whirlwind around the film as surreal and slightly comic: she declined a stylist, chose her own red-quill headpiece for an awards ceremony, and kept the trophies boxed away in her home basement before she could quite believe them. Anecdotes from award nights—heavy statuettes, near-misses on stage—join more considered reflections on what success means for a writer who still wants to “get back to work.”
Land: mapping history and the human cost
Land, published on 2 June 2026, traces a family’s lives against the aftermath of the mid-19th-century famine and the mapping work carried out by the British-executed Ordnance Survey. Drawing on archival fragments and the discovery that her great-great-grandfather produced survey maps, O’Farrell built a novel that interrogates colonisation, eviction and the reshaping of landscapes after disaster. She describes the book as her most political, aiming to tell the history of a place through the intimate geography of a single plot of land.
Set in the west of Ireland in 1865, the story follows multiple generations as they reckon with loss, altered property boundaries and the moral ambiguities of those who profited from or administered relief during the famine years. Through characters and scene she examines the structural forces—crop failure, export policies, colonial administration—that compounded the catastrophe sometimes called the Great Hunger.
Roots, routine and the next chapter
O’Farrell’s personal history—born in Northern Ireland, raised partly in Wales and later Scotland—feeds into her attention to displacement and divided selves. She writes in a glass studio in her garden, surrounded by vintage fountain pens, rescue animals and a routine that keeps her tethered to the work. Despite commercial successes—more than eight million books sold and translations across dozens of languages—she admits to recurring doubts in the writing process, and yet continues to begin new projects.
Looking ahead, O’Farrell plans to adapt Land for the screen herself, hoping to carry the book’s intimacy into a screenplay. Whether on the page or in film, her project remains the same: using the particular to illuminate larger histories, and letting personal survival inform the urgent choices of a storyteller.
