All about best-selling author Maggie O’Farrell

22nd May 2020

Maggie O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, on May 27, 1972.

She grew up in Wales and Scotland, and was educated at North Berwick High School, and Brynteg Comprehensive School. But at the age of eight, she was hospitalised with encephalitis and missed over a year of schooling. These events are echoed in her novel The Distance Between Us, and described in her 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. After school, Maggie read English Literature at New Hall, Cambridge.

At different times, she has worked as a waitress, chambermaid, cycle courier, teacher, arts administrator and, most recently, as a journalist, both in Hong Kong and as the Deputy Literary Editor of The Independent on Sunday. She has also taught creative writing at the University of Warwick in Coventry and Goldsmith’s College in London.

Maggie’s debut novel After You’d Gone (published in 2000) received international acclaim and won the esteemed Betty Trask Award. Her novels usually succeed in being both commercially successful and critically acclaimed – here is the full bibliography, together with the awards she has won or for which she has been shortlisted:

Novels:

• After You’d Gone (2000) – winner of the Betty Trask Award
• My Lover’s Lover (2002)
• The Distance Between Us (2004) – winner of the Somerset Maugham Award
• The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2007)
• The Hand That First Held Mine (2010) – winner of the Costa Book Awards
• Instructions for a Heatwave (2013) – shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards
• This Must Be the Place (2016) – shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards
• Hamnet (2020) – shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction

Memoir/autobiography:

• I Am, I Am, I Am (2017)

Maggie O’Farrell’s novels question how the things we choose to hide can cause our lives to unravel; as well as how we deal with loss, and how we can start to repair the damage.

Well-crafted portraits of both individual lives and relationships (with lovers and with families), her stories have appealed to a wide cross-section of the book-buying public looking for an engaging read which probes more deeply than ‘chick lit’.

In 2011, Maggie contributed the short story ‘How the Oak Tree Came to Life’ to ‘Why the Willow Weeps’, an anthology sold to fund the work of the Woodland Trust, which planted five trees for each copy sold.

O’Farrell is married to fellow novelist William Sutcliffe, whom she met while they were students at Cambridge. They live in Edinburgh with their three children. She has described Sutcliffe as ‘a huge influence’, saying, ‘Will’s always been my first reader, even before we were a couple, so he’s a huge influence. He’s brutal but you need that’.

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