Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, in 1972 and grew up in Wales and Scotland. Before publishing her first novel, After You’d Gone, she worked as a journalist in Hong Kong and London. Her books range from contemporary family stories to historical fiction, alongside the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am and several books for children.

O’Farrell often builds narratives by moving between times, places and viewpoints. Families keep secrets; absence changes the shape of a household; women push against roles assigned to them. In her historical novels, she gives intimate imaginative lives to figures who survive only faintly in the record. The Marriage Portrait follows Lucrezia de’ Medici into the dangerous court of her husband, Alfonso II, while her artistic intelligence sharpens her awareness of captivity and power.

The Hand That First Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award. Hamnet, her novel about Shakespeare’s family and the death of his son, won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction; it was later adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize.

Begin with The Marriage Portrait. Its opening suspicion that Lucrezia’s husband intends to kill her gives the novel immediate tension, while the portrait, the caged tigress and the rituals of court life reveal O’Farrell’s gift for turning historical fragments into a vivid story about female agency.