British · b. 1972
Maggie O'Farrell writes about the knife-edge between life and death. "Hamnet" (2020) reimagines the death of Shakespeare's son and the grief that might have produced the play; it won the Women's Prize for Fiction. "The Marriage Portrait" (2022) follows Lucrezia de' Medici, dead at sixteen, possibly murdered by her husband. "The Hand That First Held Mine" (2010) won the Costa Novel Award. The Irish-British author's memoir, "I Am, I Am, I Am," catalogs seventeen brushes with death. Her fiction carries the same intensity: every moment matters because it might be the last.