Maggie O’Farrell jokes Oscars made her feel invisible

Maggie O’Farrell remembers the Oscars dress she wore as a kind of surreal costume—because when she walked the red carpet, she felt the spotlight was meant for stars, not for a middle-aged writer. The author also looks ahead to her 10th novel, Land, and revisit

When Maggie O’Farrell looks back on her year of awards, she doesn’t describe it as a victory lap. She calls it a dream. “The whole thing was such a surreal experience,” the 53-year-old author says from her home in Edinburgh. “When I look back now at going to the various awards ceremonies. it was like it didn’t really happen. like some strange dream.” She laughs. then gestures toward a moment that still feels absurdly close: the other day she was rifling through her wardrobe and found the dress she wore to the Oscars. “What’s that?!” she mimics, shaking her head in bewilderment.

She’s speaking in her yoga clothes, sitting at what she describes as a “Sellotape- and school permission form-strewn ‘admin desk’.” She writes elsewhere, in an internet-free hut in her garden, her bright copper curls framing oversized, thick-rimmed black glasses.

O’Farrell’s book Hamnet—her fictionalized account of the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son—has been one of the decade’s most talked-about novels. It has sold over two million copies. been translated into 40 languages. and won both the 2020 Women’s Prize for fiction and the Waterstones Book of the Year. For the screenplay. she was initially reluctant. but when Nomadland’s Chloe Zhao came on board to direct in 2023. O’Farrell was persuaded to write the script with her. The film. made from that collaboration. has the same kind of fidelity to the novel’s emotional weather: a haunting. gorgeously shot tribute to nature and motherhood and the love that endures through loss.

At the Oscars. Jessie Buckley won an Oscar in February for her tender portrayal of Hamnet’s mother. Agnes. usually known as Anne Hathaway. The film also features Paul Mescal scribbling away with a quill as Shakespeare. O’Farrell admits she’s seen the backlash too—debates over whether the audience sobbing at screenings amounts to “grief porn.” But her own work. spanning nearly 30 years. has long taken on traumatic material with candour. from The Marriage Portrait in 2022 (her imagined life of a child bride) to The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox in 2006 (probing the dark history of silencing women through psychiatry).

“There are things that you think about in life,” she says. “You think, ‘It would be great if one day I could do that,’ but going to the Oscars was never something I thought of. It was like saying, ‘One day I really hope I will become an Olympic skier.’”

Even the red carpet, which many people treat like a stage, sounded to O’Farrell like part of the job. “For actors and performers, the red carpet is actually a necessary part of the job,” she says. “It’s a lot of where you get work I think.” Since she isn’t a performer in the same way. she adds. she decided to enjoy it instead of trying to understand it. “So I thought, ‘I’m just going to enjoy it’.”.

Her Oscars look was a fuchsia pink satin gown chosen with help from the people closest to her. She calls it “a very joint decision between my daughters and my friends.” She refused the stylist she was offered for the ceremony. “It would just be very peculiar. I don’t think anyone else has chosen my clothes for me since I was probably about five.”.

And that’s where her story turns—toward a blunt, almost funny truth about visibility at the Oscars. “What was it like being photographed alongside the likes of Mescal and Buckley?” the interviewer asks.

O’Farrell gives a wry laugh. “When you go to something like the Oscars you realise that the people everybody wants to look at… it’s really not a middle-aged writer. Obviously everybody wants to look at the star and I’m completely happy with that. I would really not want the level of fame that some people at the Oscars have, not at all. To me it looks like a very unenviable state.

“So, you know, you go and you walk the red carpet and they say to you, ‘Stand here,’ and they take photographs. What happens if you’re a middle-aged writer is you stand there slightly awkwardly and the photographer will just think, ‘Who the hell is she?’”

By February. Hamnet’s momentum was already being counted in industry language: she says the film team’s work brought her a Bafta and a Golden Globe. with Zhao and the film’s team. and an Oscar nomination with Zhao for the screenplay. O’Farrell’s life has moved on from the awards circuit. The pace hasn’t slowed. She is about to publish her 10th novel, Land.

Land is a story about the family of a mapmaker living in the shadow of the Great Famine. a catastrophe that blighted Ireland from 1845 to 1852. The novel takes in migration, colonisation, Britain’s imperial past and the environment. It also immerses readers in 19th-century life on the west coast of Ireland. at a time when the island was under British rule.

The book grew partly from family myth. O’Farrell says it had always been a story in her family that her great-great grandfather worked on an early map of Ireland. though she didn’t know the details. When she researched, she discovered he had been a labourer for the Ordnance Survey in 19th-century Ireland. Finding him wasn’t easy. she says. because if you were Irish and worked for the Ordnance Survey—which was run mostly by the British army—you weren’t allowed to sign your own work; it had to be signed by a British army officer.

“The date when he was working, at the tail end of the famine, caught her attention.” Ireland, she says, “had undergone a cataclysmic change. It had lost a third of its population both from death by starvation and forced eviction, forced emigration.”

She stresses there were complex reasons behind the tragedy, but also points to centuries of occupation and colonisation as contributors. Charles Trevelyan. the British government official in charge of famine relief. described the Great Famine as an “act of God”—a punishment for an “idle. ungrateful. un self-reliant people.” O’Farrell says Trevelyan was knighted a year after he wrote the letter containing those words. “For me that tiny nugget tells you all you need to know about the attitude of the British government. ” she says with a bitter smile.

In Land, she doesn’t step around the horror of the period. She describes one young girl left alone in a house surrounded by her dead relatives. and a boy forced to bury his father. O’Farrell says she felt “such a huge amount of vertigo at the prospect of writing about the Great Famine. ” more than she felt for Shakespeare.

“I think if you’re going to write about it, you have to write about it properly,” she says. “You’ve got to write about it from a very informed standpoint. So, yes it was hard, because it’s just – the realities of it. You can read a million people died of starvation-related diseases – that’s probably a conservative estimate. But when you actually read the details, it’s so sickening and so horrifying.”.

Her writing life has always had a kind of stubborn gravity to it. That gravity also comes from where she came from. O’Farrell was born in Derry in 1972, four or five months after Bloody Sunday. Her dad was from Dublin and her mum had been born in the North of England. though her maternal line was from Northern Ireland. The family moved around between nearby towns for a couple of years until her father was offered a job in Cardiff. taking them to South Wales. They stayed there for a decade before moving to Scotland.

Growing up with an Irish surname in mainland UK during the Troubles wasn’t just background noise, she says. “It was hard,” she says. She describes constant Irish jokes—“Thick paddies. ” where “the Irishman is always stupid.” “I think people thought they were funny but actually they really weren’t. It was quite wearing.”.

Then there were the insinuations from adults. She says parents of peers. friends. and teachers would ask whether her family were in the IRA or if her parents planted bombs. She remembers the question about why she didn’t come to school in a balaclava. “She’s talking so calmly,” the moment is described, “the horror of this takes a few seconds to land.”.

“How did it make her feel?”

“I mean, we kind of got inured to it. I just had to keep my head down. But it was really hard when it was adults saying that to you when you’re a child,” she says. “When I think about that now it’s absolutely horrifying: a teacher basically asking a child if their parents were terrorists. I hope in this day and age there are strong laws about saying that kind of thing to a child.”.

She spent most of her childhood summers in the west of Ireland, where Land is set. Her Irish identity today, she says, is complicated. “I love going to Ireland and I feel instantly at home and I love hearing the accents and I love not having to spell my surname constantly. But at the same time I’m very aware the way I talk instantly identifies me as somebody who isn’t [someone who grew up in Ireland].”.

Land is being bought by Hamnet film producer Liza Marshall, with the potential of adapting it for screen. Would O’Farrell do anything differently if she were involved again?. She gives an answer that sounds less like an audition and more like gratitude. “I think what it brought home to me with Hamnet was how incredibly lucky I was to have such superlative collaborators on the project. and I think that is so important. ” she says. “Chloe was the perfect person to direct and the cast, they were absolutely spot on.”.

She describes the atmosphere on set: “The kind of atmosphere that Chloe fosters on set is very, very communal and inclusive. She listens to other people, you know, listens to all sorts of people’s opinions. I think the happy atmosphere on set makes for a good film.”

Even her daily working life has shifted since lockdown, when she wrote in her daughter’s Wendy house. Now she has a garden studio, and she admits she might have outgrown the setup: “I thought, ‘I like this, but ergonomically this is not going to work long term’.”

Has she bought herself anything specific to celebrate Hamnet’s continuing success?. She pauses. “That’s a point, have I?” Then she tells the story anyway. When she was in LA, she went to the Oscars with her long-term friend and agent Victoria Hobbs. They were “slightly jetlagged,” she says. In Venice Beach the day before the Oscars. they saw a place doing permanent jewellery. and both got permanent matching anklets. It’s jewellery custom fitted to your body. she explains: “the ends of a chain melded together to fit your body.” “It was quite mad. ” she says. with amusement. “I thought, ‘Why not?’ When you’re in your fifties you have to do these things.”.

Land is published by Tinder Press on 2 June, £25.

Maggie O'Farrell Hamnet Oscars Jessie Buckley Paul Mescal Chloe Zhao Land Great Famine Ordnance Survey Derry Bloody Sunday Troubles Tinder Press