Maggie O'Farrell: in conversation
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-05-03

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet is an unforgettable reimagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written. Hamnet won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 and was named Waterstones book of the year. Maggie will be in conversation with afshan d’souza-lodhi.

Praise for Hamnet

‘The story of Hamnet Shakespeare has been waiting in the shadows for over four hundred years. Maggie O’Farrell brings it dazzlingly, devastatingly, into the light.’ Kamila Shamsie

Maggie O'Farrell is the author of the Sunday Times No. 1 bestselling memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, and eight novels: After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave, shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award,This Must Be the Place, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Novel Award, and Hamnet. She lives in Edinburgh.

Afshan D’Souza-Lodhi was born in Dubai and bred in Manchester. She is a writer of plays and poetry, and was recently commissioned to write and direct a short film for Channel 4 (An Act of Terror) and a radio play for BBC Sounds (Chop Chop). Her debut poetry collection [re:desire] (Burning Eye Books) came out in June 2020. Her most recent play, Santi & Naz, described as “tender yet sharply political” by the Guardian, puts female friendship against the backdrop of the partition of India and Pakistan. afshan sits on the boards of Manchester Literature Festival and Pie Radio.