Maggie O'Farrell

Maggie O'Farrell is a British-Irish author whose Hamnet — a reimagining of Shakespeare's son's death — is a masterpiece of grief, domestic life, and historical imagination.

Maggie O’Farrell grew up in Northern Ireland and Wales before settling in Edinburgh, and her fiction has always been notable for its psychological density and its attention to the ways that past and present layer over each other in individual lives. Hamnet, published in 2020, was a departure in setting — sixteenth-century Stratford-upon-Avon and later London — but confirmed and extended her gifts. The novel imagines the circumstances of the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet from plague when the boy was eleven, centering not on Shakespeare (referred to only as “the father” or “the husband”) but on his wife Agnes, a woman of unusual perception and self-sufficiency.

The novel is extraordinary. O’Farrell’s prose is heightened but never overwrought, and her descriptions of grief — its irrationality, its physical weight, the way it exists in rooms and objects and the bodies of those left behind — are among the finest treatments of the subject in recent fiction. Her decision to sideline Shakespeare and focus on the women and children of his household is both politically deliberate and artistically brilliant: it recovers lives from historical invisibility and produces a novel that is more emotionally alive than any conventional Shakespeare biographical narrative could be.

O’Farrell is demanding in the best way. Her sentences require attention, and the novel’s emotional power is accumulated rather than stated. Readers who approach Hamnet expecting accessible historical entertainment may be initially disoriented by her oblique approach to chronology and character. But for readers who give it what it asks, it is a deeply affecting and beautifully made piece of work.