Literary Birthday – 27 May – Maggie O’Farrell

Happy Birthday, Maggie O’Farrell, born on 27 May 1972.

Maggie O’Farrell Quotes

1. You can’t redraft and rewrite and recraft an empty page. So, write. Set down your words, don’t look back, don’t re-read. Just put down what you need to say and worry about fixing it later. (Facebook Page)
2. I would never not read. I’d feel like a musician who never listens to music; it would just be wrong. And actually – especially when you are at a certain stage in your book – it’s such a relief to sink into somebody else’s world and just receive their wisdom and receive their words and their artistry. I like to read lots of new books to see what other writers are coming up with. (Women’s Prize)
3. In a sense, gaps in history are frustrating for a biographer or historian. But for a novelist, those gaps are quite enticing. They form this kind of vacuum that you are able to step forward and fill with whatever story you yourself want to tell. (Women’s Prize)
4. My husband is also a writer and we are each other’s first reader. He always reads my second or my third draft – and he can be pretty mean! But you need it. (Women’s Prize)
5. In order to get a feel for the times and the scenario and the locations, you have to read an awful lot of history about that time, but in order to inhabit the lives of people whose history is written in white or written in water, in a sense, you have to go a bit further and do something a bit different. So to understand what Hathaway’s life was like I did physical things, as well as reading about the time. I planted and grew my own Elizabethan medicinal herb garden. And I went on a course to learn how to make those plants into medicines. (Women’s Prize)
6. Most writers’ work happens when they are away from their desks, when they are looking the other way, when they are engaged with some other mundane task. The washing up, the folding of laundry, the school run, the debate with a small child over the merits and demerits of wearing of a coat in December. (The Guardian)
7. All books are written against impossible odds; the odds just change as time goes on. I write around the edges, and always have. My first two novels were written while I was working full-time, the next in an odd, tractionless hinterland between giving up full-time work and having children. (The Guardian)
8. I do believe that a book has its own engine that is always running somewhere at the back of your mind. (The Guardian)
9. There is nothing so dangerous to good writing as having too much time, too much liberty. You need the filtration system of being kept from your work. You need to reach the keyboard in a state of hunger, of desperation. You need to sit down at your desk with a desire to unleash all that you have been mulling over, all those solutions and permutations and reframings. (The Guardian)
10. I am devoted to the practice of redrafting. I don’t plan too much but like to mould and alter as I go. (The Guardian)

Maggie O’Farrell is an award-winning Irish-British novelist. She writes historical fiction and contemporary literary fiction. Her novels often explore themes of family secrets, grief, trauma, and the lives of women in history. She is the author of Hamnet, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 and the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards, and the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, both Sunday Times No. 1 bestsellers. Her novels include After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand that First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave, and This Must Be the Place. Her novel, The Marriage Portrait, was published in August 2022. She is the author of three children’s books. She was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for her work on Hamnet. In July 2021 she was announced as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Follow her on Instagram.

Source for photograph: TimDuncan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MaggieOFarrell_EIBF2025_i280.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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