Author maggie ofarrell biography of williams
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Maggie O’Farrell
The winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and named a New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of the impact of grief, and a tender re-imagining of a forgotten boy whose name lives on.
In 1580’s England, during the Black Plague, a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known for her unusual healing gifts and her understanding of plants and potions. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, Maggie O’Farrell grew up in Wales and Scotland and now lives in E
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Hamnet—Maggie O’Farrell
[I read this 2020 novel in three sections, and wrote in detail after each section. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
23rd January 2021
To when Agnes returns late from her beehives
There are two time-lines going, not that we realise it at first. The novel opens with the boy we soon discover to be Hamnet trying, among other things, to get through his day without crossing his bullying grandfather. He, Hamnet, is also trying to work out what’s going on. O’Farrell has chosen to write in the continuous present tense that has become the norm in historical novels, and she uses it to trap whichever consciousness she’s following in the forward momentum of a fast-moving moment that is deliberately, I assume, given little or no context. Even more than the characters, the reader has to work things out as events unfold. Sometimes O’Farrell will help us
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Maggie O’Farrell
Biography: Maggie O’Farrell is an author and screenwriter. Maggie has co-written the screenplay adaptation of her novel HAMNET (with Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao) for Hera/Neal St/Amblin Entertainment, which has started filming in July 2024 starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. HAMNET was the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Maggie’s novels include THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT beneath option to Element Pictures, THE grabb THAT FIRST HELD MINE, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award and is beneath option to Estuary Films, and THIS MUST BE THE PLACE, shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Novel Award and will be produced as a TV series for Amazon, starring Orlando Bloom.
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US won a Somerset Maugham Award; THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX was shortlisted for the 2013 revben Novel Award, and INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE was shortlisted for the revben Novel Award. Her memoir I AM, I AM, I AM became a Sunday Times no 1 bestseller. Her titl