Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning Hamnet gives us new and illuminating insight into Shakespeare and his masterpiece, and the family that nurtured him. Told from the perspective of Shakespeare’s wife, this devastatingly beautiful novel takes as its starting point the true fact of the death of their 11 year old son, Hamnet (a variant on the more familiar Hamlet), and from there weaves a deeply moving story of family, love and, most profoundly, of grief, and the paths we must navigate through them.

Chaired by Anton Enus