Maggie O’Farrell is the author of Hamnet, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 and the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards, and the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, both Sunday Times No. 1 bestsellers. Her novels include 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 and This Must Be the Place. Her novel, The Marriage Portrait, was published in August 2022. She is also the author of two books for children, Where Snow Angels Go, and The Boy Who Lost His Spark (October 2022).

She worked as a journalist in Hong Kong and London. She also taught creative writing at the University of Warwick and Goldsmith’s College. She has lived in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Hong Kong and Italy. She now lives in Edinburgh