Maggie O'Farrell is a highly acclaimed novelist from Northern Ireland. Her first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award, and a later work, The Hand That First Held Mine, was awarded the 2010 Costa Novel Award. O'Farrell has been shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award twice more, for her novels Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. In 2020, her novel Hamnet won the prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction, as well as the fiction prize at the National Book Critics Circle Awards. O'Farrell's memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, also reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. In 2025, O'Farrell co-adapted her novel Hamnet for the screen with director Chloé Zhao, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.