Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| After You’d Gone | 2000 |
| My Lover’s Lover | 2002 |
| The Distance Between Us | 2004 |
| The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox | 2006 |
| The Hand That First Held Mine | 2010 |
| Instructions for a Heatwave | 2013 |
| This Must Be the Place | 2016 |
| Hamnet / Hamnet and Judith | 2020 |
| The Marriage Portrait | 2022 |
| Land | 2026 |
Publication Order of Children’s Books
| Where Snow Angels Go | 2020 |
| The Boy Who Lost His Spark | 2022 |
| When the Stammer Came to Stay | 2024 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death | 2017 |
About Maggie O’Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell (born 1972) is an Irish-British novelist best known for “Hamnet”, her 2020 novel about the death of William Shakespeare’s son, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She has published ten novels, a memoir and three picture books for children.
O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, and grew up in Wales and Scotland. At the age of eight she was hospitalised with encephalitis and missed more than a year of school, a period she has said fostered her love of literature. She read English Literature at New Hall, Cambridge, then worked as a journalist, first for a computer magazine in Hong Kong and later on the arts desk of The Independent on Sunday in London.
Her first novel, “After You’d Gone” (2000), won a Betty Trask Award. “The Distance Between Us” took the Somerset Maugham Award in 2005, and “The Hand That First Held Mine” (2010), which moves between 1950s London and the present day, won the Costa Novel Award. “Instructions for a Heatwave” and “This Must Be the Place” were both shortlisted for the same prize. Her memoir, “I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death” (2017), recounts a series of near-death experiences, with each chapter headed by the part of the body affected.
“Hamnet” imagines the family life of Shakespeare and his wife Agnes around the death of their eleven-year-old son in 1596. The Royal Shakespeare Company staged an adaptation in 2023, and O’Farrell co-wrote the screenplay for the 2025 film with its director, Chloé Zhao. The film, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture (Drama) and brought O’Farrell an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. “The Marriage Portrait” (2022), based on the short life of Lucrezia de’ Medici, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize.
Her most recent novel, “Land”, was published in June 2026. It is set in Ireland in the aftermath of the 1840s famine and follows a map maker commissioned to survey the country. O’Farrell lives in Edinburgh and is married to the novelist William Sutcliffe.
Photo: TimDuncan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).