'Hamnet' novelist Maggie O'Farrell maps her Irish roots in 'Land'

Fresh Air

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Arts, Society & Culture, Books, Tv & Film

4.3 • 36.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2026

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

O’Farrell’s 2020 novel ‘Hamnet’ was adapted into an award-winning film last year. She co-wrote the screenplay. It’s about the grief Shakespeare and his wife Agnes struggle with after their son, Hamnet, dies of the plague, and how that grief leads him to write the play Hamlet. O’Farrell’s new novel, ‘Land,’ is about the lives of an Irish family living in the aftermath of the Great Famine. Even though she writes historical novels, she tries not to lean too much into history: “I find there’s nothing that makes me put a book down faster than if somebody is trying to show me that they’ve done all their homework,” she says. ‘Land’ is in part based on her family.

Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Classicist Mary Beard’s new book ‘Talking Classics.’

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Our guest is author Maggie O'Farrell. She's best known for her
0:06.5	2020 novel Hamnet. It was adapted into a movie last year, and Jesse Buckley won an Oscar for her
0:13.0	performance as Anya Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's wife. O'Farrell co-wrote the film's
0:18.5	screenplay with its director, Chloe Zhao. Maggie O'Farrell spoke towrote the film's screenplay with its director, Chloe Zhao.
0:21.6	Maggie O'Farrell spoke to Fresh Air's executive producer Sam Brigger about her new novel, Land.
0:27.6	Here's Sam.
0:28.6	Hamnet is a fictionalized version of the story of William Shakespeare and his wife, Anyas Hathaway.
0:33.6	It's about how they meet and fall in love, marry, and have children. Their young son,
0:39.1	Hamnet, dies from the plague. The grief shakes the family and lead Shakespeare to write his play,
0:44.7	Hamlet. O'Farrell's novel Hamlet won Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction. Maggie O'Farrell has a new
0:51.8	novel called Land. It takes place in Ireland in the 1860s, beginning with Tomas and Liam, an Irish father and 10-year-old son, out in foul weather, mapping a peninsula as part of the British Ordinance Survey of Ireland.
1:06.0	Tomas, somewhere between employed and indentured to British soldiers, is tasked with modernizing
1:12.5	the maps of Ireland. Something magical happens on the peninsula that forever changes the trajectory
1:18.3	of their family and compels Thomas to move his family from the tight quarters of their city's
1:23.3	one-room apartment to an abandoned cottage on the peninsula and begin an agrarian life.
1:29.3	There are many abandoned cottages and houses and villages throughout Ireland, as the novel
1:35.1	takes place only a decade or so after the country's great famine. The countryside has been
1:40.4	emptied out with millions lost to the famine and to emigration. Tomas is in part
1:45.5	mapping the erasure of those lives from the land. O'Farrell has written eight other novels,
1:51.2	children's books and a memoir called I Am, I Am, I Am, 17 brushes with death, about, well, her
1:57.7	brushes with death, nearly being murdered, nearly drowning, and her
2:01.7	childhood encephalitis that left her with various balance and spatial recognition challenges.
	...

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