Maggie O’Farrell, writer: Identity is complicated

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Interview — Maggie O’Farrell, writer: Identity is complicated
BBC World Service | May 28, 2026
Host: Katie Razzle

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Episode Overview

In this episode, acclaimed writer Maggie O’Farrell sits down with the BBC's Katie Razzle for a candid and wide-ranging conversation. O’Farrell discusses her latest novel, Land—a sweeping, historical exploration set during the Irish Famine and rooted in her own family history. The episode traverses the intersections of personal and national identity, the legacies of colonization, the complexities of diaspora, and the politics of memory, while also touching on O’Farrell’s experiences adapting her work for the screen, and the evolving relationship between Ireland and Britain.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Inspiration and Politics Behind Land

• O’Farrell explains her motivation for writing Land, which is set in 19th-century Ireland during the Great Famine and follows an Irish mapmaker working for the British army.
  • “I found the date he started working for them was 1848...that's two years into the Great Famine. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like...” (04:20)
• She describes the devastating human and geographical impact of the famine, including “famine roads” built as part of brutal relief efforts.
  • “These people who were starving and ill and dying...were forced to build roads and dig drainage ditches...the roads actually go nowhere...it's such a kind of mark of the brutality of that whole relief system.” (05:20)

Researching and Portraying History (07:08–08:19)

• O’Farrell discusses the challenges of researching the famine and grappling with whether such trauma should be fictionalized.
• She highlights important academic works and reflects on the relative academic silence for many years.
• “If you are going to write about 19th century Ireland and about mapping and about the British colonisation, you can't not. You can't shy away from it.” (07:21)

The British Role in the Famine and Calls for Reckoning (08:19–10:11)

• O’Farrell speaks candidly about the complex causes of the famine, including both natural and deeply political factors.
• She singles out Charles Trevelyan, the British famine relief officer, quoting his callous description of the Irish and his subsequent knighthood.
  • “He describes it in a letter as an act of God for an idle, indolent, ungrateful, unself-reliant people...I would quite like the British government to rescind it. I think it's long, long overdue.” (08:51–09:13)
• O’Farrell clarifies that she’s not campaigning, but wants critical thought about historical accountability.

On National Identity and Diaspora (10:32–12:19; 17:48–19:46)

• The conversation turns to her experience as part of the Irish diaspora in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s.
  • “It was not easy actually to be Irish in Britain at that time...teachers looking me in the face as a child and saying, is your dad in the IRA?” (10:32–11:09)
• She reflects on microaggressions and the evolution of attitudes in Britain:
  • “Even up until...the early 90s in London...one of my colleagues said, oh, it’s so funny, whenever I speak to your dad, I always think he’s going to give us a five minute warning. By that point I was in my 20s and I said...You’re implying my dad’s a terrorist bomber.” (11:09–12:02)
• O’Farrell shares her layered identity:
  • “I was born in Canterry and then I moved to Wales and then I moved to Ireland...if your accent doesn't match your name...you walk alongside all your life a kind of ghost self.” (18:04)
  • “I never feel more Irish when I'm in Britain, and I never feel more British than when I'm in Ireland. My cousin described me as Irish adjacent, which I quite liked.” (19:29–19:38)

Themes of Prejudice and Contemporary Resonance (03:49; 12:54)

• O’Farrell repeatedly returns to concerns about the global rise of racism and the importance of teaching tolerance.
  • “The rise of racism is really, really concerning for everybody...everyone who can be considered by some people to be an Other. Yeah, I think it's really frightening. And I think all of us...need to work hard at trying to teach our children and teach our children's children about not hating other people for being slightly different from yourself.” (03:49 and 12:54)

Mysticism, Irish Myth, and Responsibility in Fiction (16:17–19:15)

• The novel Land includes elements of Irish mysticism—talking animals, mythic landscapes.
  • “In those Myths...the Irish land and landscape is actually animate. Trees talk and have opinions...I wanted to get a sense of that kind of mystical animism as much as I could into the novel.” (16:59–17:24)
• O’Farrell grapples with the potential for stereotyping and the tension between mysticism and realism:
  • “Maybe my worry is that...maybe I’m not quite Irish enough to write this book. That was certainly something I did worry about because, you know, I don’t sound it. ...I suppose I was more worried about that." (19:15–19:38)

Adapting from Page to Screen; The Hamnet Phenomenon (15:39–24:32)

• O’Farrell recounts her whirlwind experience attending awards and premieres for Hamnet’s screen adaptation, sharing the surrealness of mixing with Hollywood A-listers.
  • “I bumped into someone on the street and they said, how's the Oscars? And I thought, is she talking about the TV? Then I thought, oh, yes...It was so peculiar. …It’s like saying, I don't know, you can be an Olympic skier one day. So far from possible." (20:21–20:59)
• She describes the process of adaptation as “fascinating,” noting the fundamental differences between film and novel storytelling.
  • “The language of cinema is so much younger than the language on the page...and it's still very young. A baby language, really, by comparison.” (22:56–23:13)
• O’Farrell hints that she may adapt her latest novel for the screen as well.
  • “I think I want to, yeah. I think I just find it hard to let it go because it’s so personal and I would want certain elements of it to be done right.” (24:11)

On Children, Reading, and the Challenges of Today (24:57–26:18)

• O’Farrell reflects on her own early reading habits, shaped partly by illness, and the challenges modern parents face in encouraging children to read.
  • “The world that our children and young people are living in is the world that we've created and bequeathed to them. ...Maybe put down their own screens...school libraries are important. School librarians are crucial...And being read to is really crucial.” (25:27–26:18)

What’s Next for Maggie O’Farrell? (26:18–26:44)

• On future projects, O’Farrell remains superstitious:
  • “I do have a superstition talking about things that I haven't finished yet...So I have started something that's quite tentative. ...I've got something that I'm thinking about.” (26:22–26:44)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I never feel more Irish when I’m in Britain, and I never feel more British than when I’m in Ireland.” — Maggie O’Farrell (19:29)
• “He [Charles Trevelyan] describes it in a letter as an act of God for an idle, indolent, ungrateful, unself-reliant people...I would quite like the British government to rescind it. I think it's long, long overdue.” — Maggie O’Farrell (08:51–09:13)
• “You walk alongside all your life a kind of ghost self. ...Who would I have been if we'd stayed, you know, what would I have been like?” — Maggie O’Farrell (18:04)
• “The language of cinema is so much younger than the language on the page...it's a baby language, really, by comparison.” — Maggie O’Farrell (22:56–23:13)
• “All of us need to work hard at trying to teach our children and teach our children's children about not hating other people for being slightly different from yourself.” — Maggie O’Farrell (03:49 and 12:54)

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Important Timestamps

• 03:49 & 12:54 – On the rise of racism and the importance of teaching tolerance
• 04:20–06:13 – Personal family history and the impact of the famine
• 07:08–08:19 – Researching the Famine; fiction vs. reality
• 08:19–10:11 – Critique of Britain's response to the Irish famine
• 10:32–12:19 – Diaspora identity and microaggressions in Britain
• 16:17–17:48 – Mysticism, myth, and animism in Irish literature
• 18:02–19:46 – The complexity of national identity (“Irish adjacent”)
• 20:21–21:35 – Experiencing the awards circuit for Hamnet
• 22:56–24:32 – Adapting novels for film
• 24:57–26:18 – Children’s reading habits in the digital era
• 26:22–26:44 – Sneak peek at O’Farrell’s next work (without specifics)

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Tone & Language

The conversation is thoughtful, reflective, and candid, blending O’Farrell’s personal anecdotes, political critique, and literary insight. O’Farrell speaks with a mix of humor, humility, and the occasional wry observation, maintaining warmth even when venturing into difficult historical and contemporary terrain. The overall mood is intellectual yet accessible, with both host and guest open about complexities and uncertainties.

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This episode provides not only a rich look at the historical and emotional threads animating O’Farrell’s newest book, but also a meditation on memory, belonging, and the ongoing work of reckoning with the past—making it both timely and timeless.

Transcript

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[Katie Razzle]

Hello, I'm Katie Razzle, the BBC's culture and media Editor and this is the interview from the BBC World. The best conversations coming out of the BBC People shaping our world from all over the world.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

If you're not a little bit afraid

[Podcast Advertiser]

then you're not paying attention.

[Katie Razzle]

We have never seen a people so united.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Do not make that boat crossing. Do not make that journey.

[Interviewer]

Being born in America, feeling American, having people treat me like I'm not.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

We're more popular than populism.

[Katie Razzle]

For this interview I met the acclaimed Northern Ireland born writer Maggie O' Farrell at her home in Scotland's capital Edinburgh. The 54 year old has been a published author for more than 25 years with her books translated into more than 44 languages. O' Farrell shot to wider international fame following her award winning screen adaptation of her 2020 novel Hamnet a story about the son of the English playwright William Shakespeare. She's now publishing Land, her sweeping new tale centered around an Irish mapmaker working for the British army. At the the time of the Great Famine in Ireland in the mid 19th century, between 1845 and 1852, at least 1 million people died due to starvation and disease, with a further 2 million people fleeing Ireland to escape the famine. The book is about colonisation and devastation, set against a backdrop of families left to die of starvation on estates owned by British aristocrats and landowners. Drawing on her own family history during that period, it's O Farrell's most political work yet, and as she explains, its themes still resonate with the world today.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I think the rise of racism is really, really concerning for everybody. Not just Jews, not just Muslims, everybody, I think, and everyone who can be considered by some people to be an Other. I think it's really frightening. And I think all of us need to work hard, hard at trying to teach our children and teach our children's children about not hating other people for being slightly different from yourself.

[Katie Razzle]

Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Maggie o'.

[Interviewer]

Farrell.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

When I was looking in the archives to find out about my great, great grandfather and his involvement with the Ordnance Survey and I found the date he started working for them was 1848, which, you know, as anyone who's studied history will know, that's two years into the Great Famine. And it just struck me, it really stopped me in my tracks, that date. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like because they were doing the sort of second version of the map of Ireland. And it's obvious why those revisions were needed, you know, because this huge cataclysm had swept through the country. And as you say, a million people has died. I mean, that's probably a conservative estimate. Some historians put it as almost double. And a further million people, again probably more, had been forced out and forced to emigrate, mostly to North America. And so the human geography of Ireland had completely been reconfigured by this disaster and also the physical geography, because a lot of the Irish, so called famine relief meant that in order to get relief, in order to get some food, you had to do some kind of physical work. And so these people who were starving and ill and dying of typhoid and cholera were forced to build roads and dig drainage ditches and, you know, the roads actually go nowhere. They're called famine roads in Ireland and you often see them going up hillsides, they jump up the hillside and Then they stop. I mean, just seeing them is such a kind of mark of the brutality of that whole release system. It seems awful to even call it a release. That's what it was called. Definitely not really. So obviously, you know, in terms of cult, you know, just to confining our talk to cartography, they had to revise these. Cause whole villages had been wiped out. You know, estates were redrawn, the Rundale system of farming was reconfigured and so many people had been evicted. So it was necessary to do those revisions. But I couldn't really get my head around what it must have been like doing that work, being someone who'd lived through it.

[Interviewer]

And you do that so powerfully with, well, one of the characters who has. It's been so horrific what's happened that he's blocked out the death of his entire family, literally leaving him the only one still alive and ending up in the workhouse.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, I mean, the workhouses were again, they were sort of supposedly relief, but they were quite brutal places. In order to get into them, you had to give up your land. And also parents were separated from children, families were separated. That was a necessity of the workhouse. And, you know, that in itself is such a brutal idea. There were so many houses that were just taken away and evicted and destroyed. They had landlords used gangs to, with their battering rams to destroy and take the roofs off houses so nobody could go back. And so in order to, you know, receive food in the workhouse, you had to give up your land and give up your family.

[Interviewer]

And how did you research the book? You must have done quite a deep dive into some pretty miserable parts of certainly British history. And obviously also horrific things happened in Ireland.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I mean, I think, you know, the family's really hard to think about and read about and write about. It did give me a huge pause because I thought, is this something that should be fictionalised? I'm not really sure. But in a way, if you are going to write about 19th century Ireland and about mapping and about the British colonisation, you can't not. You can't shy away from it. You have to write about it and you have to write about it properly and you have to research it. So I did. I mean, there are books about it and there is a brilliant, beautifully put together Furman Museum in Roscommon and there are lots of documentation about it. And, you know, for a long time there was a weird silence with academic studies about it. I don't know, that's an interesting. There was not much was written about it. And de Valera commissioned the first ever book about it. And then an English woman, Cecil Woodham Smith, wrote a book about it called the Great Hunger. And then obviously over the last more recent decades, there's been a lot of history books about it and academic studies. And there is, you know, I think famine studies is an established discipline now.

[Katie Razzle]

And how much of that past do

[Interviewer]

you think is still unresolved when it comes to Britain's role in it? Fault in it?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I mean, it's a complicated thing. Obviously the famine has very, very complicated and multiple factors. You know, there is this kind of natural element to it, the bacterium that affected the potatoes. And then there are the very, very long standing political socioeconomic circumstances of the British colonial rule. There's also the way the British government dealt with it and their attitude to it. So there was a man called Charles Trevelyan who was appointed famine release officer. His attitude to the famine is so upsetting and so horrifying. He describes it in a letter as an act of God for an idle, indolent, ungrateful, unself, reliant people. A year after he wrote that letter, he was given a knighthood for his revolution work in feminine relief. So Tyrellian holds that knighthood to this day. I would quite like the British government to rescind it. I think it's long, long overdue.

[Interviewer]

Is this the beginning of the campaign?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

It's not a campaign. I'm just inviting a bit of thought about this. He owned lots of slaves in Grenada. He which and his family, to be fair to them, have apologised about that and they have addressed it. But I would quite like this knighthood to be addressed. I don't think he should have it.

[Interviewer]

Yes, and in the book, obviously we're talking about mapping being about power and subjugation and colonization and resistance. And there's a bit. What they want is for this peninsula and for the whole country to be left in peace. History has other plans. It is decided that the larger country, that's Britain, should claim its dog shaped neighbor Ireland, to tame it, to subjugate it before anyone else does. And when I say it's political, that's what it feels. Do you think that Britain still hasn't fully acknowledged and atoned for the wrongs of the history of Ireland?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Oh, wow, that's a big question. It is. I mean, there have been prime ministers who have apologised for their role in it, which I think has been very good. And I think, you know, relations between Britain and Ireland have improved so much, you know, and I'm amused now by. There's so many people in Britain who are trying to get an Irish passport. It's quite.

[Interviewer]

To get back into the eu.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah, exactly. To get back into the eu. Everyone's scrambling for an Irish grandparent. So. So I don't know, I mean, it's not that I wanted to reawaken all that hostility. Not at all. The interesting thing to me is, you know, I mean I, you know, we moved to Britain when I. In the 70s, of course, when relationship between Britain were very fraught, you know, and it was, it was not easy actually to be Irish in Britain at that time. We got an awful under, kind of thin. Under the wedge was lots of Irish jokes and the other end of the wedge was teachers looking me in the face as a child and saying, is your dad in the ira?

[Interviewer]

How did that affect you? How did that shape you, do you think?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I don't know. I mean, weirdly. I mean, I think about it now, it's horrifying but at the time it just made me a bit kind of nervous and you know, it was sort of. And I think, well, you know, my dad's a mild man, economics teacher, of course he's not, but in the ira. But even up until the point I was working, you know, at a newspaper in the early 90s in London and my dad must have phoned me while I was away from my desk and one of my colleagues said, oh, it's so funny, whenever I speak to your dad, I always think he's going to give us a five minute warning. By that point I was in my 20s and I said to this person, it's not okay to say that, you know, I wasn't, I was no longer a 10 year old child in a schoolroom and they kind of laughed it off and I said, can you not say that that's not all right? You're implying my dad's a terrorist bomber. And it was a strange moment. Everybody was slightly offended by my fury at that.

[Interviewer]

I don't think that would happen now, would it?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Well, I don't know. I hope not. As I was saying, I think relations have improved so much, but I don't know. I don't know whether it's just because people are less racist or because maybe there are newer waves of immigrants who are absorbing that kind of hostility. Unfortunately, I don't know.

[Interviewer]

Clearly your book is focused on Ireland but you know, it feels very timely with all the border disputes around the world, whether it's the Middle east or Ukraine and Russia. You know, we know that maps are a one way that people who, you know, want to subjugate another or take over their land or whatever, that that is what happens. And I wonder whether you felt that that prejudice that you faced as an Irish child that that has actually transferred to other people, whether that is Jews in Britain and what they're going through now, or indeed Muslims or, you know, whoever.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I think the rise of racism is really, really concerning for everybody. Not just Jews, not just Muslims, everybody, I think, and everyone who can be considered by some people to be an Other. Yeah, I think it's really frightening. And I think all of us, all of us need to work hard at trying to teach our children and teach our children's children about not hating other people for being slightly different from yourself.

[Katie Razzle]

You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service.

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[Maggie O'Farrell]

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[Katie Razzle]

When I rang the doorbell of Maggie o' Farrell's Edinburgh home, it was with a little bit of trepidation. Would the acclaimed author have become a bit starry after the whirlwind few months she's just had? Jet setting between the UK and the us schmoozing with the Hollywood A list and winning awards for her role adapting her novel Hamnet for the big screen. I needn't have worried that she has had her head turned by LA goodie bags and limos on tap. She opened the door with a big smile, offered me and my colleagues tea and told us the whole experience had been completely surreal. Ok, let's return to my conversation with Maggie o'. Farrell.

[Interviewer]

Getting Back to Land I know that you do like mysticism. You've got a talking fish in a pool, a forbidden corpse, a sacrificial burial thousands of years ago. Why did you want to go down that sort of mystical side of the story?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Well, I think with this book I was trying to do two things, one of which is to tell the story of a family who are endeavoring to survive in the long shadow of the great hunger. But also I wanted to tell, or I wanted to set myself the task of telling the whole story of Ireland right from the start. I mean, I say from the first inhabitants, but actually there's one clause that goes back to the Ice Age. So I wanted to tell the whole story of Ireland just by one plot of land.

[Interviewer]

No big feat, no big task.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I think it's really good to set yourself a new task or to learn something new with every book. So this is what I wanted to do. You know, it's very important to me. When I was a child, my my father would only ever read us Irish myths. We used to beg him to stop and read, you know, I don't know, Pippi Longstocking or Secret Garden. He never would had to read Irish Myths, which at the time I was a bit annoyed by. But actually now I'm quite glad because it form a kind of certain bedrock in my sense of narrative, I think. But in those Myths. And in those stories, the land or the landscape, the Irish land and landscape is actually animate. Trees talk and have opinions and rocks open up and people are living inside them and mountainsides shift. And I wanted to get a sense of that kind of mystical animism as much as I could into the novel.

[Interviewer]

As somebody who. I think I understand that you see yourself as Irish and British. Is that right? Both or how do you see.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Both, really.

[Interviewer]

Both and neither.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

It's very confusing when people ask me where I'm from. I think they expect one word, but I usually have to give them a paragraph.

[Interviewer]

Fair enough. What is that paragraph?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Well, I was born in canterry and then I moved to Wales and then I moved to Ireland. And yeah, it's very complicated. And I feel there's a strange sense, you know, I think if you grow up somewhere different from where you were born, and this is true of everyone, I think, or if your accent doesn't match your name, as in my case, you walk alongside all your life a kind of ghost self. And there's always a sense, who would I have been if we'd stayed, you know, what would I have been like? I would have sounded different, you know, because I don't have even the trace of the Middlesex. And, you know, my life would have been so different. So I think there's always that sense. I think for anyone in that position.

[Interviewer]

You were talking earlier about racism is often about stereotyping.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

So what people said up to you

[Interviewer]

about your father or whatever.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And I suppose, I wonder.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Stupid. That was all the basis of Irish jokes.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, exactly. And I wonder, as somebody who is Irish and is part of the Irish diaspora, how much of a responsibility you feel, I guess not to stereotype, not to go too mystical. And it's what I mean, then it

[Maggie O'Farrell]

verges into to be too Celtic.

[Interviewer]

Exactly.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Too. Maybe that's wrong.

[Interviewer]

You know what I mean? Like, do you do. Is that something you worry about or have worried about or how do you view that?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I don't know, It's. That's not something I really worry about. I don't really see that as. That's not my experience of Irish people in an island and not at all. Maybe that's how Ireland is seen from the outside. I think. I think my worry is that I. That maybe I'm not quite Irish enough to write this book. That was certainly something I did worry about because, you know, I don't sound it. I mean, my passport's Irish and so. So I suppose I was more worried about that I mean, I never feel more Irish when I'm in Britain, and I never feel more British than when I'm in Ireland. My cousin described me as Irish adjacent, which I quite liked. Irish adjacent.

[Interviewer]

There you go. I feel that since I've seen you. Well, I have seen you a lot because you won't have been aware of me because you were on a lot of red carpets.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I saw you over the last. We said so.

[Interviewer]

Exactly.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

We did. I did.

[Interviewer]

Wait, was that when you were wet? Was that at the bathtub when you were wearing the amazing red quill?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Oh, yeah, that's right.

[Interviewer]

That was rather fabulous.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Thank you. Made by an Irish woman. Yeah.

[Katie Razzle]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

And I wondered what that experience has been like. You've gone on this absolutely mad whirlwind because of Hamnet and the film.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Can you sit back now and reflect on it in any way?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

It's. It's really hard to reflect on it because it sort of feels now. I mean, a kind of month on or whatever it is from what we are, from the Oscars. It sort of feels like something I dreamt, in a way. I bumped into someone on the street and they said, how's the Oscars? And I thought, is she talking about the tv? Then I thought, oh, yes. I'd slightly kind of. Yeah. It was so. So peculiar. What a weird thing to happen. I mean, it's not even something that you. You don't have things in life where you think, I hope that might happen to one day. I mean, it wasn't on the wish list. It never even occurred to me it was possible. It's like saying, I don't know, you can. I don't know, you can be an Olympic skier one day. Which for me is very. So far from possible. Yes. It was so peculiar. And the whole thing was very, very surreal. It's sort of. When you're there, it's a bit like a kind of dream because you're looking around the room, this theater, and you see everybody that you've seen on TV or cinema for the last year or so. And I had one really weird night where I suppose the whole weirdness of it came home to me because I was standing in a kind of queue to sit down in my seat, and there were people talking behind me. And I thought to myself, that's so weird. That guy sounds exactly like George Clooney. And then I turned around and I thought, that's because it is George Clooney. And I thought. It took me a while for me to kind of catch up with. Yes. Actually, that is the reality of what's happening today.

[Interviewer]

Land has now been optioned. Land is being made into a film by the same people who made Hamnet.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

That's right. Well, we'll see. I mean, it's very, very early days. We'll see. I mean, these, you know, I think the. The film mode is quite mysterious to me. And it seems to. It moves very, very slowly and then very, very fast. It's a. It's, you know, I mean, when. When the whole kind of, you know, we were writing the script, Chloe and Jo and I were writing a script for Hamnet, and it was getting kind of closer and we were talking about locations and actors and costumes, and it was. And I kept saying, People kept saying, are you excited? And I kept saying, no, because it still might not happen. It might not happen. It might not happen. You know, I can't. And then there was a day when I was. I was on set in Elstree and I was standing in a partially. It hasn't been quite a partially reconstructed globe. And I called my husband on FaceTime to talk about something really mundane about, I don't know, kids, sleepover or something. And he said to me, do you admit now that it's happening? And I said, okay, fine, it's happening now.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. And it really did happen in a big way.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Ended up winning Golden Globes and BAFTAs, you know, Oscars.

[Interviewer]

So I wonder, what have you learned from the Hamnet experience, if anything, but about the difference between film and novel writing?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

And.

[Interviewer]

And is one less satisfactory? I always feel films, they're wonderful, but they're not as layered as books can be. Of course they're not. You've got a 400 page book and you've got to turn it into an

[Maggie O'Farrell]

hour and a half.

[Interviewer]

I mean, it's just really different process.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I find it a really fascinating process because it uses completely different muscles, as I said. But also the language of cinema and screen is so different from the language on the page. And I mean, Chloe has said this a lot. She said the language of cinema is so much younger than the language on the page, which is so true. And it's still very young. You know, it's a kind of a baby. A baby language, really, by comparison. Obviously, I was very lucky and I had her as a co writer on the screenplay who's very experienced about bringing stories to the screen. And she arrived with quite a clear idea about which strands of the book she wanted to take from the novel. Because obviously your first task is to edit it down because the novel is, I don't know, whatever it is, 350, 60 pages. And the screenplay needs to be about 90 pages. So the first thing we had to do was bring it down and down. But I. Because I knew, obviously, I knew the novel well having written it, so I could tell if she pulled out these strands that actually. That would have a kind of strange effect a few scenes down the line on this character's motivation. So we had a kind of lot of chat back and forth about how to structure it. And I think she was right, you know, because obviously the novel, the first half of the novel particularly moves back and forth in time, as you say. And I think that can work on the page, but on the screen it's quite jarring. So that needed to be unravelled and reconstructed for the. For the screen.

[Interviewer]

Are you going to write the screenplay for Land, do you think?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I think I want to, yeah. I think I just find it hard to let it go because it's so personal and I would want certain elements of it to be done right.

[Interviewer]

Interesting. Can you already see. Because it. I can see it's a filmic book in lots of ways. You can imagine it. But can you already see how you will tell it for film in a different way?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I think so. I've already written a kind of skeleton structure, how the film might work. Nothing more than that. I was talking about it with the producer who bought Hamlet, and she's also bought land. We were just talking about. And as we were talking about, I suddenly thought, okay, I can sit. So I wrote it all down because obviously there's a lot that will have to go because it's a really. It's even longer than Hamlet, and. But there's a lot, I think, that can stay and can work on screen. I think you.

[Interviewer]

I know, read so much as a child when, you know, you had encephalitis and you were hospitalized and people, you know, you thought you were going to die. People thought you were going to die, and you didn't. But you read a lot. Obviously, one of the issues now is children don't read a lot. Do you, as an author, have any answers to that?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Did you?

[Interviewer]

I mean, presumably you're in a literary household. Your children probably do read. But, I mean, I think I'm in a literary household, and I'm finding it

[Maggie O'Farrell]

very difficult to get my children to

[Interviewer]

read as much as I'd like them to read.

[Maggie O'Farrell]

I mean, I do, and I think it's more a question of not castigating them for it. You know, the world that our children and young people living in is the world that we've created and bequeathed to them. And I think the first thing parents have to do is to maybe put down their own screens. I think children learn by how to be people, by looking at their parents. And I think, think about that, think about most importantly. And also, you know, there are things that we can encourage children. Definitely. You know, I think school libraries are really important. I think school librarians are absolutely crucial. A teacher that can guide a child because, you know, you can have a library, but if a child walks in, they're not going to know where to start. They need somebody to take them by the hand and say, try this one or try that one. And giving all children access to books is absolutely crucial. And being read to is really crucial.

[Interviewer]

So 10th novel is land. Are you already working on the 11th?

[Maggie O'Farrell]

Well, I, you see that we were talking about superstitions earlier heyday and I do have a superstition talking about things that I haven't finished yet just because I think if I talk about it then it'll kind of somehow drain me of the urge to do it. So I have started something that's quite tentative. It's a very young shoot. But yeah, I've got something that I'm thinking about.

[Katie Razzle]

Thank you for listening to the interview. You'll find find more in depth conversations on the interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, including episodes with the Oscar winning director and Maggie O. Farrell's collaborator on Hamnet, Chloe Zhao, author Sir Salman Rushdie and comedian Eric Idle. Until the next time. Bye for now.

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