Maggie O'Farrell

Award-Winning Novelist

Born in Northern Ireland, Maggie O’Farrell is the author of nine novels and one memoir. Her last novel Hamnet (2020), which intimately explores the emotional lives of Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, following the death of their son, was a winner of the Women’s Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. “Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare’s life, here is a novel that matches him with a woman overwhelmingly more than worthy,” raved The Boston Globe.

In September 2022, O’Farrell released The Marriage Portrait, her new novel of Renaissance Italy. Lucrezia de’ Medici, the third daughter of the grand duke, is thrust unwittingly into the limelight when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding, and Lucrezia must step up to the altar in her place. Young and unprepared for life in a troubled court, Lucrezia must learn to navigate the politics of an unfamiliar and mystifying society. Her new husband, too, presents a mystery — playful sophisticate or ruthless politician? —that may prove to be a test she cannot survive.

O’Farrell’s work calls our attention to the women who have often been ignored in favor of the men in their lives. Her readers experience the worlds of these characters through the vivid descriptions that characterize her novels, as if they themselves are navigating the dirty streets of Elizabethan London or reveling in the smells and flavors of Italy’s markets. Striving to keep their families safe while their husbands carve out their places in history, the protagonists of O’Farrell’s work illuminate the power, grace, and poetry of women who have never before been written to life.