In 2021, we hosted bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell for a Facebook Live conversation about her hit novel, Hamnet. Since we last spoke to Maggie, Hamnet has taken the world by storm, and next week, Maggie’s story will be a major motion picture starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, and directed by Chloe Zhao. Hamnet is the fictional tale of William Shakespeare, though he is never named. Maggie examines the death of his eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, and the effect it had on the playwright’s work. The novel was the winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner. In this episode, Maggie tells us about what it was like to write this book and also what it was like to bridge her life with the life of her characters. 

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