Back in the mists of time, Maggie O'Farrell was one of my very first guests on The Shift. So, as she celebrates the 25th anniversary of the publication of her very first novel, After You'd Gone and we wait with bated breath for the movie of her smash hit bestseller Hamnet (starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, directed by Oscar-winning director of Nomadland, Chloe Zhao, and co-written by Maggie and Chloe), I thought now was a good time to revisit our conversation from back in 2020. Since then Maggie has of course written the bestselling The Marriage Portrait and gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of Hamnet.

Here are the original show notes:

This week’s guest is the award-winning novelist, Maggie O’Farrell. The author of eight novels, most recently the stunning Women’s Prize winner, Hamnet, and one of my favourite memoirs of all time, I Am, I Am, I am. And now she’s written a children’s book, the absolutely gorgeous Where Snow Angels Go, which is a banker for a Christmas Day teatime animation a la The Snowman if ever I saw one. 

While Maggie noses through my bookcase and plays with Sausage the (tail-less) cat, we talk being a social media refusenik, giving voice to women’s stories, saying good riddance to the male gaze, why she never thought she was the marrying kind. Oh, and why she still secretly fears someone might take her Women’s Prize away! Frankly, if Maggie O’Farrell has imposter syndrome, what hope is there for the rest of us?

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

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