An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two)

Summary

Intelligence Squared: An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell – Land (Part Two)

Date: July 12, 2026
Host: Claire Armistead (Intelligence Squared)
Guest: Maggie O’Farrell

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Episode Overview

In this live recording from the Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, award-winning novelist Maggie O’Farrell sits down with journalist Claire Armistead to discuss her latest novel, Land—an exploration of historical fiction set on a single Irish peninsula across millennia. O’Farrell reflects on narrative form, the role of myth and landscape, silence as a storytelling device, ethical challenges of family-based fiction, and the adaptation of her novels for film. The episode concludes with lively audience Q&A, touching on memoir, research ethics, and the quirks of literary fame.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Deep History and Mythic Landscape

[01:23–04:45]

• Inspiration & Scope: O’Farrell wanted Land to be both a story of family and an “attempt to tell the story of a country via one peninsula and all the people who have lived on it” ([01:49], Maggie O’Farrell).

• The novel reaches deep into prehistory, briefly touching the Ice Age and delving into the Irish Bronze Age, inspired by finds from the National Archaeology Museum in Dublin.

  • Quote: “I was really worried when I handed [the manuscript] in… that it was going to come back to me with basically WTF in the manuscript.” ([03:22], Maggie O’Farrell)

• Sacred Wells: Intrigued by Ireland’s holy wells—ubiquitous, often syncretized with Christianity, and deeply rooted in pre-Christian belief.

  • A well in County Cork famed for curing madness was found to contain high lithium levels: “Just goes to show there’s a lot of truth in myth.” ([04:37], Maggie O’Farrell)

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2. The Role of Silence in Storytelling

[04:45–08:52]

• Character Silence: One character is completely nonverbal; O’Farrell wanted a novel where “you can go inside his head quite a lot.” ([05:16], Maggie O’Farrell)
• The nonverbal character “listens... to what's really going on in conversations. And he also... hears the land.” ([05:26], Maggie O’Farrell)
• Drawing from Irish mythology—where land is animate, speaking—she brings this “bedrock” into her novel’s narrative style.
• “The land is animate, it has a voice and it has an opinion, and it can interact with human characters and it can change the course of their lives.” ([06:38], Maggie O’Farrell)

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3. Novel Structure & Language Choices

[09:08–12:20]

• Chapter-less, Episodic Format: The book is structured into four sections without chapters, using line breaks instead. O’Farrell prefers an organic, non-chronological, multi-perspective flow and lets the “instinct... be the right decision.” ([09:41–11:18], Maggie O’Farrell)
• Dialogue & Language: The book contains little direct dialogue and skips language signposting—“you don’t know who’s speaking Irish”—which encourages imagination and universality.
  • Quote: “I’m not going to put things in italics.... I think the writing should imply the italics rather than them be there.” ([11:38], Maggie O’Farrell)

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4. Career & Adaptation to Film

[12:32–18:48]

• O’Farrell dislikes the term “career” for writers; novel-writing feels like “the anti-career.” She follows story needs rather than a planned trajectory.

• Land has been optioned for film by producers of Hamnet. She’s hesitant but likely to attempt the screenplay herself due to the story’s personal nature, especially handling the famine (“I would find it hard to hand over my relatives to someone else. I feel quite responsible... Also, you did come back and haunt me if I hand them over to a screenwriter—who knows.” [14:27], Maggie O’Farrell).

• Experience with adapting Hamnet for screen: “A novel is just you and the page. Screenplays are completely predicated and prepared for collaboration.” ([15:22], Maggie O’Farrell)

  • The adaptation process involves stripping the book to “bare bones,” letting the film crew re-infuse details.

• On seeing her novels transformed: “I would say the book is my baby and it’s exactly how I wanted it to be... The film is different from the book and it should be. It feels like a non-identical twin to the book.” ([17:41], Maggie O’Farrell)

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5. Historical vs. Contemporary Fiction

[22:45–24:50]

• O’Farrell does not consciously set out to write historical fiction. The difference is the “awful lot of research” needed to create convincing settings, and then only carefully selecting details—“maybe only 2% of that is showing because otherwise it just reads like someone who’s trying to show that they’ve been to a library.” ([22:45], Maggie O’Farrell)
• She prefers letting the reader’s imagination fill the gaps rather than resorting to encyclopedic detail.

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6. Audience Q&A: Memoir, Research Ethics, Awards, Red Carpet

[25:05–38:16]

• Oscars Anecdote: Attending the Oscars as a writer felt surreal—“All the photographers just go ‘oh’... which is totally fine by me.” ([25:05], Maggie O'Farrell)
• Hamnet in Present Tense: “I was trying to collapse down the distance between these people and us... I just refused to believe that at any point in history it’s anything less than catastrophic to lose a child.” ([29:17], Maggie O’Farrell)
• On Literary Awards: “You always have to hang on to the fact... it’s a bit like winning the lottery... It just depends on the people in the room... But I think they’re a brilliant way of getting readers to new books.” ([31:32], Maggie O'Farrell)
• Ethics of Family Research: When writing family history into fiction, “you have a responsibility towards them. I try to talk to as many [relatives]... just to say I’m going to write this book. Is it okay with you?” ([34:29–36:35], Maggie O’Farrell)
• Memoir & Brushes with Death: Updates on her well-known memoir: after a recent car accident, she jokes, “I’m not going to do a new edition and say 18 brushes of death.” ([36:54], Maggie O'Farrell)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “My children call me a Neek…I quite like it though.” ([02:20], Maggie O’Farrell)
• “There’s a lot of truth in myth.” ([04:41], Maggie O’Farrell)
• “One of the things that always stands out [in Irish myth]...is that the land is animate, it has a voice and it has an opinion, and it can interact with human characters and it can change the course of their lives.” ([06:38], Maggie O’Farrell)
• On directness of literary awards: “It’s a bit like winning the lottery... But I think they’re a brilliant way of getting readers to new books.” ([31:32], Maggie O'Farrell)
• On adaptation: “The film is Chloe’s and it feels like a non-identical twin to the book, appropriately.” ([17:41], Maggie O’Farrell)

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Important Timestamps

• [01:23] Deep history and the mythology of land in the novel
• [04:45] Thematic importance of silence and nonverbal characters
• [09:08] Novel structure and language; absence of chapters and explicit dialects
• [12:32] The personal nature of Land and film adaptation process
• [22:45] Contemporary vs. historical fiction and economy of research detail
• [25:05] Anecdotes from the Oscars—behind the red carpet as a novelist
• [29:17] Use of present tense in Hamnet
• [31:32] Literary awards—process and perception
• [34:29] Ethics in fictionalizing family and handling difficult histories
• [36:54] Memoir follow-up: recent brushes with danger

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Episode Tone & Language

Maggie O’Farrell’s tone is thoughtful, humorous, and candid—unafraid to blend literary seriousness with self-deprecation (“I was hit by a granny from Uruguay”), and deeply respectful towards both her material and those who populate her stories. The conversation is charismatic, blending mythic imagination with the practicalities of writing and adaptation.

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Summary by Intelligence Squared Podcast Summarizer

Transcript

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[Mia Sorrenti]

welcome to Intelligence Squared where great minds meet. I'm senior producer Mia Sorrenti. In this episode we return for part two of our recent live event with award winning author of Hamnet, Maggie o'.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Farrell.

[Mia Sorrenti]

O' Farrell joined Claire Armistead live on stage at the Brighton Dome Corn Exchange to discuss the art of historical fiction and her new novel Land. If you haven't heard part one, do just jump back an episode to catch up. But now let's return to the conversation live at the Brighton Dome Corn Exchange.

[Claire Armistead]

Let's talk a little bit more about the the other thing I raise about deep history, deep mapping because you have there's a sort of whole mythology that shapes the landscape and comes out of the landscape and belongs to it. And it also has a physical history which is there are people buried under this land who've been here a very long time.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

So I knew that I wanted to write part of the book was going to be about family and part of it was going to be an attempt to tell the story, the whole story of a country via one peninsula and all the people who've lived on it. So I knew that I wanted to go right, right back in time. So the book, I hope this isn't off putting the book does go back to Bronze Age Island. There is actually one clause that takes you back to the Ice Age, but it's only one clause, I promise. I was very pleased that I managed to keep it in there. My children call me a Neek. I don't know if anyone knows that.

[Claire Armistead]

A Neek?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, it's a cross between a nerd and a geek. I quite like it though. I like keep that one, yeah. Anyway, so the second part of the book does go right back to the Bronze Age on the same peninsula. And I mean, I really love doing it. It's partly inspired by one of my favourite museums in Ireland, which is one of my favourite museums everywhere. It's in Dublin. It's the National Archaeology Museum, which is such a beautiful building and it's such a beautiful collection and it's one of the things I love about it is it does. There are objects found in Ireland which tell the whole story of it, and most of them are found not by archaeologists, but just by people who happen to be digging on their land or digging turf anyway. So that section is very influenced by that museum. So it does go back. And I was really worried when I handed it in. So I've worked with the same editor, amazingly, and very luckily for almost 30 years now. And when I gave her the manuscript, I was slightly worried that it was going to come back to me with basically wtf in the manuscript. I mean, she would never write that, but I was worried she would say,

[Claire Armistead]

what's going on here?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

But she didn't, luckily. So it is still in there and

[Claire Armistead]

it centres on a sacred well. And actually, probably one of the reasons why they keep digging up these things is because they were thrown into. People threw net, sort of offerings, little offerings found, didn't they, into the well.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah. So I've always been really fascinated by sacred wells in Ireland. They're everywhere. So you can basically go to any village or any settlement in Ireland and there's usually one roundabout. I mean, some of them are. Yeah. If you want to find one, you go to town and usually you can ask if there's a bookshop, you ask the bookseller because they tend to know everything. Or you ask someone in the pub or you find a lady who's probably about 70 and you say, where's the local holy well? And some of them have been. Quite a lot of them have been kind of co. Opted into Christianity, into Catholicism now, and they've been. So they all go back to kind of really pre Christian pagan island and to sort of druid times and where people believed in spirits in the water. But some of them have been analyzed recently and there's one in County Cork, I think, which has been famous for, I think, probably thousands of years for curing madness. And when they analyzed the water, they found it had really high levels of lithium. Just goes to show there's a lot of truth in myth.

[Claire Armistead]

Yeah, that's fascinating. Right at the beginning you mentioned that Silence plays an important part in it and Thomas is silent for a lot of the time because he has had terrible things happen to him and they carry on happening to him. But there are other characters in it who are silent, electively silent or physiologically silent. What does silence mean? And why did you. I mean, it's a difficult thing to do. The novel is a very loquacious form and you choose to put a lot of silence in the foreground.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, it is. One of the characters is completely non verbal and I always knew he would be. I don't want to say who it is because it might be a bit of a spoiler, but I knew that he was going to be someone who wasn't actually going to speak, but you can go inside his head quite a lot. And he listens. The most important thing about him is that he listens to what's going on around him. And he hears conversations, but he hears what's really going on in conversations. And he also. Here's. This is going to sound really nuts. He hears the land. Yeah. So when I was little, my dad would only ever read us Irish myths, which at the time I used to find a bit annoying. We used to beg him to read us Pippi Longstocking or the Moomins, but he's one of those immigrants who's never quite got over leaving Ireland. He still thinks he's going to go back. We have to say to him, dad, you're 85, maybe a little bit late. But anyway, so he used to read. He only would ever read Irish myth to us, which at the time I did find a bit annoying. But now I'm quite glad he did because those stories really form a kind of bedrock of my sense of narrative and they are such particular and strange stories unrelated to anything else. I think, you know, I think Ireland has one of the best preserved folklore, I think. I don't know. I have a feeling that it's something to do with. Not that Ireland was never invaded by the Romans, unlike a lot of Europe. So its culture and its original stories and deities never were supplanted or mixed in with Roman. Anyway, that's another story. So Irish myth. So, yeah. And so those kind of stories and those kind of battles and the giants and the characters and just the kind of whole atmosphere of those narratives are really part of the way I think about stories. And I really wanted to try and get as much of the atmosphere of those stories into the novel. And one of the things that's always, I think, stands out in them is that the land is animate, it has a voice and it has an opinion, and it can interact with human characters and it can change the course of their lives. So often trees speak or rivers or wells have people or spirits or ghosts, wherever you want to see them, living in them. So there is a kind of. But then again, you know, I mean, again, it kind of goes back to what I was saying about truth and myth. There are so many giants in Irish myth, and Ireland was a country invaded again and again, and people settled from Viking countries.

[Claire Armistead]

That's interesting. So the Romans didn't, but the Vikings did, who would have had to come

[Maggie O'Farrell]

round the top of Scotland. Yeah, the Vikings built Dublin. Dublin is a Hiberno Norse town.

[Claire Armistead]

So apart from what you've already mentioned, it also enables this silence, enables the soundscape of the landscape in which they're in to impress itself in a very sort of brilliant way. For example, the skylark. Now, people will remember the hawks in Hamnet, Agnes Hawke, but here you've got a skylark who's living its own life. And it's sort of brilliantly contextualizes these little people in a historic landscape with these things that animals and birds that are living their own life. Or in one case, a dog that just appears from nowhere and makes its own choices.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, that's right. Well, you know, I think that's where it goes back to the Irish myths that I was trying to kind of use, the sort of tropes from those in the novel. But also, you know, early maps, I think, were described as a bird's eye view. So I had to have a bird in there looking down on the people, because that's a kind of form of mapping in itself.

[Claire Armistead]

And they also often had sort of heraldic animals, didn't they, in maps, in

[Maggie O'Farrell]

the corners of maps, the bits you

[Claire Armistead]

didn't know would have a lion in it.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Sea monsters. Lovely sea monsters in old maps.

[Claire Armistead]

It doesn't have sea monsters.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

It doesn't have it. Yeah, I know. I didn't go that far.

[Claire Armistead]

So let's just talk a little bit. Oh, yeah, no, I know what I wanted to ask you. Sorry, I wanted to ask you about the very particular form of writing that you've chosen for this. You don't have chapters. It has four sections, but you have. It's like episodic, but it's not episodic in a. It doesn't follow a progression, a time progression. It darts backwards and forwards and into different places in these very short sections, which are just marked with a line break, with a Line break between them. What brought you to that structure?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I don't love chapters, actually, as a kind of way of organizing a narrative. I think I could be wrong, actually. But I think I've only written one book where I used chapters, and that's because it was multiple points of view, but. And I suppose this one's multiple points of view. Yeah, I find them sometimes. I mean, I'm not saying I don't like reading novels which are in chapters. I'm very happy to other people to use them, but it didn't feel. It didn't feel like the right form for the book. I mean, you know, I often leave decisions about things like that up to the kind of what Rudyard Kipling called the wrong side of his head. You know, things like tense and case and the way the story needs to be arranged on the page. I often think it's something that the. I mean, I don't kind of consciously make those decisions. I usually wait and see what's going to happen. Sometimes I think the story will tell you what it needs. So I was once writing a book. I think it was the hand that first held mine, and I'd begun it and it was in the first person present tense, as in I eat or I sit. And what I noticed was that every day when I sat down to start writing, I would automatically begin writing in third person past tense. So she ate, she sits. And after a while I thought, what's going on? Why do I keep doing that? And I read over the pages and I thought, I've done it wrong. It needs to be. The instinct is the right decision. It needs to be third person patterns. So I spent a really dull week changing every I to she and every E stand. It ate. But it had to happen. It was just. It was wrong. It was like wearing a really tight pair of shoes. It just felt wrong.

[Claire Armistead]

And you don't have dialogue, which is really interesting because actually what I realised, it feels to me as if what you're doing is you're enabling us to imagine it being spoken in two languages. Because they don't all speak the same language, do they?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yes.

[Claire Armistead]

They don't speak the same dialect. It doesn't place anybody. You don't know who's speaking Irish and who's speaking.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, there are certain times, I think. Yeah, maybe. Actually, no. I think maybe one of the drafts I did specify, and then I changed my mind. Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to put things in italics. Italics upset me, especially in tag. I mean, I like italics, but I Think changing the form on the page. Yeah. I think the writing should imply the italics rather than them be there.

[Claire Armistead]

So you just have these Irish. It's dotted with Irish words, but apart from that, again, it's like the peninsular effect. You're not specific about it, which enables you to go there and make it with the imagination of a reader.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yes. In fact, one point my editor said, hang on, are they speaking Irish in this scene? And I said, of course, but you don't need to know that. It's fine.

[Claire Armistead]

Yeah.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

It's not important.

[Claire Armistead]

Quite late on, I realised that they would be speaking in Irish and I thought. Well, I didn't really think about it, but of course they would. Yes.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Claire Armistead]

Do you think you've. It's significant that at this stage in your writing career you've come to this novel?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Oh, that's a big question. I don't know. I don't really think about things. I mean, I find the word career, when applied to a writer, is a bit mad. It feels like the anti career if you choose to write novels. It doesn't feel like someone who's really that interested in careers. I don't know. I mean, I think for whatever reason, it just was the right point in my life at the right point in the story. You know, I think the first decision you have to make with the novel is where in the kind of. If you imagine the chronology of it like a river, the first decision. The first decision you need to make, or one of the most important decisions is where in the river you step in. Do you step in right by the estuary and go back to the source, or do you step in the source or halfway through? And, you know, sometimes that's really stymied me for a long time before I can start another. Stymied me with Hamnet. I had written some of it before I. A few years before and it was the wrong point in the river. And then I just scrapped it all and I realised I had to start with the boy. And that was. I think that was the point in this. Sometimes if you get the first sentence, you think, okay, I need to start there. They need to be mapping.

[Claire Armistead]

And that will set the tone to some extent of what you're going to do.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

And suddenly you can work out how the novel needs to branch out all its tributaries.

[Claire Armistead]

Now, it's already been optioned, has it, this novel, or is it.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yes. So it's been bought by the same producers who made Hamnet. So I know it's in incredibly good hands.

[Claire Armistead]

And are you going to write the screenplay.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Well, yeah, we've been talking about this, I think. I mean, it's very early days and there's nothing kind of decided yet, but I think I'd find it really hard.

[Claire Armistead]

It would have to be completely different, wouldn't it? Because of this, the way that you write indirect dialogue, indirect conversation, but you have to make it direct.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, I think I'd find it hard to hand it over to another writer. So maybe I'll give it a go, see what happens.

[Claire Armistead]

You're a bit of a control freak.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

No, not control, I think, because this one. No, because actually there are other books of mine. I've been quite happy to say go for it, but I think this one feels so personal and I think, you know, if you're going to write about the great famine, it's got to be handled in a very particular way. I don't know, I just. I think I would find it hard to hand over my relatives to someone else. I feel quite responsible. They didn't ask for their great great granddaughter to write a novel about them. Also, you did come back and haunt me if I hand them over to a screenwriter who knows.

[Claire Armistead]

You did a pretty good job of Hamnet. You can obviously do.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I had a very good co writer on that one.

[Claire Armistead]

How does screenwriting compare and how did you sort of fit it into your other life as a novelist? Did it take over your whole life for a while?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

No, I mean, actually I was writing the screenplay for Hamnet with Chloe Zhao, the director, and this. I was sort of moving back and forth at one point, not throughout the whole process, but it does. I find it uses completely different muscles as to writing fiction. I mean, you'd think on paper it would be quite similar, but it's really not. I mean, I've never written a screenplay that's original, you know, from scratch. You know, I've only ever done the adaptation of a book that was mine. But yeah, it seems, it's so. It's so different. You know, you start with a 350 page novel and you have to winnow it right down to 90 pages. So you have to. And, you know, a screenplay is completely predicated and prepared for collaboration, where a novel is just you and the page. You know, novelists are lone wolves and a screenplay by its very nature has to be a collaboration. So you strip, you know, you strip everything, all the detail, all the nuance out of a screenplay, all the, you know, what people are wearing, what it looks like, all the emotion. You take it all out and it's just down to its very bare bones. And then on set, of course, you rely on your collaborators to put it all back in. You know, your costume designers, your set designers, the actors, cinematographers, the lighting designers. All that detail that you've taken out is put back in again. So it feels like a completely different document.

[Claire Armistead]

Did you have any particular things that you fought for in Hamlet to be in the film that were in the film? Were there any things that you lost that you regretted?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I mean, it never felt like I had to fight, really. Not because I'm saying I agreed on everything which is not. Wouldn't be. It was never a process where I felt that I was handing it over to her or relinquishing it to her in a way. I mean, I think partly because the way she works is very collaborative anyway. But we, you know, she arrived at the process, obviously she had a lot of experience bringing stories to the screen, but she arrived at the process with quite a clear idea about which elements of the novel she wanted to retain for the film. And I was able to say yes, but if you pull on that thread two scenes down the line, this character's motivation is completely unclear and it affects. So it was just. We sort of passed it back and forth between us. And I think the big joy for me about the film, I suppose I would say the book is my baby and it's exactly how I wanted it to be, and it always will be. And the film is different from the book and it should be. You know, I think if you go into the process expecting it to be a replica, I mean, it can't be because it's a completely different medium and the language of cinema is so different from the written language. But, you know, you have to expect it to be someone else. You know, the film is Chloe's and it feels like a non identical twin to the book, appropriately.

[Claire Armistead]

That's a good way to. That's a very good way to express it. So the marriage portrait is also in production at the moment.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

That's right.

[Claire Armistead]

So. So that's the Renaissance novel, your Medici novel.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

That's right. Yes, it is, yeah. So that's with a French Lebanese director, Audrey De Wuen, and she's writing the screenplay. I don't know, I haven't even seen the screenplay yet. But it's quite exciting. I've had several zoom calls with her and I think she has a really good feeling for the story and yeah, it's quite exciting.

[Claire Armistead]

Has that got a time scale now or is it very early?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I don't know, I'm not sure. I'll have to get back to it.

[Claire Armistead]

But you're definitely not going to be so hands on with that.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I don't know. I haven't been involved in the screenplay for that. I was writing Hamnet and I couldn't take on another one and she's a Russian director so I was very happy for her to take that on. I'm not sure what's happening with it now and it seems to be getting close, but I'll have to let you know.

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[Maggie O'Farrell]

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[Maggie O'Farrell]

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[Maggie O'Farrell]

Starbucks refreshers concentrates are coming home.

[Claire Armistead]

Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours. You started with contemporary novels and you've now moved into historical. Your last three historical Are you going to go back to contemporary or are you now locked into history? What is the difference between them for you?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I think, I mean, I don't, when I sit down to write a novel set in the past, I don't consciously think now I shall write a historical capital H, novel, capital N. And I try to just approach it as I would any other story. And I think, I mean, the thing about writing a novel set in the past, there's an awful lot of research you have to do, you know, in order to create a scene in a, I don't know, a cottage in 19th century Ireland or palazzo in 16th century Florence. You need to know so much before you can start writing. You have to know what people are wearing, what their clothes are made of, what the floor's made of. If there's a cup on the table, what's the cup made of? What do the windows look like? How does the light come through? You need to know all that. But actually, in the final edit of the scene, you need to make sure that maybe only 2% of that is showing because otherwise it just reads like someone who's trying to show that they've been to a library. And there's nothing, there's nothing that forces me. I mean, there's nothing that leads me to put down a historical novel faster if I feel that I'm being treated to a lecture on Bakelite being an early form of plastic. I mean, I'm interested in that, but I don't want to see it in a novel.

[Claire Armistead]

There's a lovely moment in the marriage portrait, which I always think encapsulates what you're saying, which is when she looks down from the windows of the Pitti Palace. It's the Pitti palace, isn't it, on this menagerie? But she's looking from so high up and you just think, well, that's got everything in it. It's got the menagerie, which was a real thing. And it's got what it would have felt like to look. Be a woman who was sort of not allowed to go out of a palace because she was a woman looking out of a window. And that was all she could see

[Maggie O'Farrell]

of it was just from the top. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you have to go there, you know, to. I mean. And I actually wrote that novel mostly during lockdown, so I was completely trapped at home and I needed to go. So I went to Florence's suit. I mean, I had been around it before. We used to live near Florence a long time ago. So I'd been to the palace. But yeah, as soon as travel restrictions lifted, I went around. It was really empty. It was amazing. I've never seen Florence before.

[Claire Armistead]

Yeah, it's a shame. A lot of people should have gone and nobody did.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, I know. It was a good experience.

[Claire Armistead]

So just before I open it out to the audience, so I hope you'll all start thinking of your questions, tell us what it was like going down the red carpet.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Oh, it's really hard to describe. I mean, the Oscars is just a really weird day out and it's incredibly long. You start getting ready for it at about 9 in the morning, just after breakfast. So you have your breakfast and then you're putting on your evening dress. It's very. And you know you have to go, you get in your car and then you queue in your car to get into the right road and then you queue in the road to go through. And the security is. I mean, you think airport security is strict. I mean, it's much more difficult to get into the Oscars. And your dog, the car has to be sniffed by a sniffer dog and then you finally go through. But the funny thing about going to the red carpet as a middle aged writer is that they say to you, come and stand on this spot here. And then you do. And all the photographers just go, oh, and all you see is about 50 lenses going, oh, no, we don't want to take a photograph. Which is totally fine by me. But it is just very, very strange. And as you go, you know, because I'm a kind of civilian in that world and it takes you a while for your brain to kind of catch up. And you look around the room and you think, everybody in this room I've seen on screen.

[Claire Armistead]

So you feel like you've walked through a sort of your eyes through the looking glass.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

It's really odd. All the men are tiny. I felt like a giant. Even George Clooney. Well, I had a weird experience. This is a kind of illustration of how odd it is to go as a civilian that I was in a kind of. I was waiting in one of the kind of aisles of the auditorium and there was people talking behind me. And I thought, it's so strange. That man sounds exactly like George Clooney. And then I thought, that's because it is actually George Kenny. He's very handsome up close. So I can testify. It's not really a shocking, controversial statement, is it?

[Claire Armistead]

And you went in a car by yourself or do you go with other members of the. Do you arrive separately?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Oh, I had my plus one, who was my agent. Yeah, we went together, which is very lucky. And we actually had a picnic in the car. Cause someone told us that there's no food, which is true. By the time it ends at 9:30, everybody is so hangry that they would eat the upholstery.

[Claire Armistead]

And you have to. What happens if you need a pee? You can't get out to have a pee.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

You have to wait for an ad break. There's a lot of ad breaks. There's an award and then there's an ad break where everybody just mills about and chats to their friends and has we. And then you have to be back in your seat. And if you leave your seat and you're not back in it, you get a seat filler. I was really surprised. I started chatting to the one next to me and they were kind of. Why are you talking to me? I just thought it was. Yeah. So if you leave your seat. So they can't have any. So all these people who wait in the corridor and evening wear and they're ushered in to sit down. I mean, it's the weirdest experience.

[Claire Armistead]

Just in case people find that they're not. That they have.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Well, I think if the camera sweeps of the audience, they don't want any empty seats. Yeah, yeah. Everything about it is extraordinary. Another world, Another world.

[Claire Armistead]

Let's open it up to you, the audience. Thank you very much for listening so indulgently. Can we have. I can't actually see where anybody is. Do we have any light action? Yes. Hooray. Here you are. Who are going to be the brave people who ask the first questions and who make their way to these microphones which are up there and up there? Do we have any hands? Yes, we've got. Oh, no, that was somebody just fiddling with their hair.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

You're so awed by all this.

[Claire Armistead]

Actually, I do. All right. Do I need to use a microphone or can I just shout?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

You sound quite clear to me.

[Claire Armistead]

Is that going to be all right in terms of the. That's not going to be all right in terms of them broadcasting it.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Oh, that's all right.

[Claire Armistead]

We will get a microphone to you. Do we have anybody further back who can actually get to a microphone? Oh, here it comes. It's not a very big question. Never say that.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

No pressure.

[Claire Armistead]

First, I was going to ask about the marriage portraits and if you're going to make it into a film, and I was very excited to hear that you are. But second, it's quite a small point, but why did you write Hamnet in the present tense?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Why did I write Hamlet in the present tense? I think with Hamnet, I was trying to collapse down the distance between these people and us. You know, I think the world changes unrecognizably. You know, if they came to our world, they'd be horrified by the noise. And I think, you know, I think one of the exercises for me anyway, was trying to. I mean, the reason why I wanted to write it in the first place, the kind of engine behind it for me was that I always felt that Hamnet wasn't the boy, wasn't well known enough, and that he'd been relegated to a footnote. And also, I was really cross that every time I read a biography of Shakespeare, he only got maybe one or two mentions. And often his death was wrapped up in these really, I think, quite offensive statistics about child mortality, as if the implication was that it wasn't really that upsetting, because they were more used to it. And I just refused to believe that. I refused to that any point in history it's anything less than catastrophic to lose a child. But also one really respected Shakespearean, which I'm not going to tell you who it was actually wrote the sentence. It's impossible to know whether or not Shakespeare grieved when Hamlet died. You just think, and I Was so crossed that I threw the book across the room. So I think one of the things I wanted to achieve with the book was to kind of keep them in the present tense, to say, these people, yes, the world has changed, but actually, I don't think human hearts and minds have changed that much at all. And this boy's death was hugely significant to his family and that without him, we wouldn't have Hamlet and we wouldn't have Twelfth Night.

[Claire Armistead]

Okay, thank you. So it was a big question, not a small question. Anyone else? Oh, yes. Another one down the front.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Pass the parcel.

[Claire Armistead]

So we're only letting this very front section use this roving mic. Everybody else has to go to the side to take a microphone.

[Audience Member]

Is it working?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Oh, yes, yes. I just wanted to ask you how you feel about literary awards. You're obviously very. You're nominated from.

[Claire Armistead]

Win things, but how, as an author,

[Maggie O'Farrell]

how important are they and what part do they play in your. When you're writing books? I think generally literary awards are a very good thing. I mean, as a reader, I think they're amazing at sometimes suggesting and promoting work that you wouldn't necessarily pick up. You know, it's wonderful to look at a shortlist for, I don't know, the Booker or the Women's Prize, or Costa or whatever it is, and you think, oh, I haven't heard of that book. And then you want to go and investigate it. So I think they're great, kind of opening you out to new books. And certainly when you're given one, it's a really very nice phone call to get. But I think you always have to hang on to the fact that. I mean, I've been on the other side of it as a judge enough times to know that actually it is pretty. It's a bit like winning the lottery is a bit of luck as well. It just depends on the people in the room and whether they happen to like a book and which way the conversation goes. But, I mean, I think they're a brilliant way of getting readers to new books, which is only ever a good thing, isn't it?

[Claire Armistead]

If you think that there's something like 160,000 books published in this country every year,

[Maggie O'Farrell]

and some of them, you know, sometimes debut novels or something really interesting, and just gets up over that parapet, which is always a good thing.

[Claire Armistead]

Thank you. We got anybody else? You're all going to want to ask questions right at the end.

[Audience Member]

Hello. I'm half Irish and I've never been to Ireland so far away.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Sorry. It takes 40 minutes to fly there. I know, go on.

[Audience Member]

I don't deserve to be half Irish. It's fine. But like you, we were told, my mum said, oh, your great grandmother wrote for the Irish Times, the first woman to write for them, and your grandfather was the first man to own a motorbike in Ireland. And it just. It's ridiculous. And it was really interesting that you had this piece of information and you looked about it. But what's also really interesting is I found out what my great grandfather did in the war, which he didn't want anybody to know, and I found his signature and the things you're talking about. And I kind of feel really guilty because I went into a past that he didn't want me to know his service number and he didn't want me to know his thing. And when you were doing your research, my great grandmother apparently wasn't very nice. So every time I've tried to ask, I've been met with kind of horrific stories about her, and I want to know how far it's true. But also, the people that are alive who are in their 80s are like me. She was horrible. She was an alcoholic, but she was obviously a really interesting woman. Did you, when you were researching your own family, find out some unusual. Or was it difficult at stages to feel like, should I put this into fiction or should I keep this for myself? Does that make any sense?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think you have. I think if you're writing about anyone who was real, whether they're your relative or not, you have a responsibility towards them. I definitely felt that also writing this and writing Hamnet and writing the marriage portrait, which are based on real people, and I was always really conscious of that. And also, you know, and I think it's tricky. I think if you're writing a biography of someone or a history book, which I could never do, I don't have the skills for that, but I think that's a different thing. I think then you are on a bound to dig up everything you can and use everything you can. But I think with fiction, I don't know, I mean, I try. I think my rule with always to find out as much as I possibly could and not to try to ignore something if it didn't quite fit with the story I wanted to tell you had to kind of find a way to weave it in. But I think it is. I think there is an interesting responsibility with. If you're going to use fact as a kind of starting point or a springboard for fiction. And I think you'd have to decide. But it's one of the reasons why with this book I don't use their real names and I don't always, you know, I don't really want to talk sort of mark, where the, where the joins are. This bit's true, but that's not true. And this is a bit I, you know, I made up or this is a bit I didn't make up because I feel that they should be like, I mean, just like I said, I feel that they should be probably left in peace and they didn't really ever expect me to come along, start digging up things about them. But I think it's a decision you have to make. And also probably need to talk to family. I mean, I'm very far obviously from their only living relatives, so I've got many cousins and I try to talk to as many of them and my siblings as possible just to say I'm going to write this book. Is it okay with you? And just to kind of include people and just to say to you, what do you know of them and how would you feel about it?

[Claire Armistead]

Did you have any pushback?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

No, they've all been very nice so far. Yeah. But who knows, maybe they won't. Maybe they won't when they read it.

[Claire Armistead]

Thank you. We've got somebody up at the mic. Thank you very much for doing that.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

So, Maggie, the first book of yours

[Claire Armistead]

that I read was of your many close brushes with death. And I was wondering if you've managed

[Maggie O'Farrell]

to stay safe since then or if

[Claire Armistead]

there's any new episodes since it's been published.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

You know, it's funny, someone asked me that question the other day, a friend of mine, and I said, no, it's been totally fine. And my husband said, what about the car accident? And I said, so spoiler alert, the car accident was okay in the end, but yeah, my daughter and I were hit by a visitor from Uruguay who had just been on an international all night flight and just hired a car and was driving up the wrong side of the road. So that was, I mean it wasn't really, but the policeman did say to me, if you hadn't been driving. I said, I'm not going to say a certain brand of car because this isn't an advertisement. It might have been different. So I'm only ever going to drive this certain brand of car now. But apart from that, fingers crossed, tucked in wood, it's been okay. But I'm not going to do a new edit and say 18 brushes of death. I was hit by a granny from Uruguay.

[Claire Armistead]

So, leading on from that question, do you have another memoir in you or is that it?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Do you finish with that sight? I don't know. I'm not sure. I mean, I never, ever thought I'd write a memoir at all. In fact, I used to joke about it with my husband. He used to say, you're as likely to do that as you are to ever write a memoir. I don't know. You never know. You never know where it's going to take you next.

[Claire Armistead]

And that's a great place to end. Thank you very much for coming. And Maggie, you're brilliant. Thank you very much.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Thank you. Foreign.

[Mia Sorrenti]

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts for ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a member at intelligencesquared.com forward/membership. If you'd like to join us at any future live events, you can find our full program or buy [e-mail] attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.