Maggie O'Farrell is one of the most loved writers in the English language. Her debut, After You'd Gone, published in 2000 marked the start of a career that has established Maggie as one of the great storytellers of our times. Hand that First Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award. Hamnet won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was Waterstones' Book of the Year, and was also a no. 1 bestseller. Her most recent novel, The Marriage Portrait, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. Maggie’s memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am, which detailed seventeen near-death experiences that have punctuated her life, debuted at no. 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list in 2018. Maggie has co-written, with Chloé Zhao, the screenplay for Hamnet. The film starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal won two Golden Globes and it has been nominated for eight Academy Awards and eleven BAFTAs. Maggie’s tenth novel, Land, is publishing in June 2026; a multi-generational epic which opens on a windswept peninsula in the west of Ireland, inspired by Maggie’s own family history and by the landscape of the Great Atlantic Way. Maggie was born in Coleraine in Northern Ireland and grew up in Wales and Scotland. She currently lives in Edinburgh.