Maggie O'Farrell
British literary fiction in the early twenty-first century saw considerable formal experimentation alongside a renewed attention to domestic life, grief, and personal memory among writers working in English. Maggie O'Farrell was born on 1 January 1972 in Coleraine and holds United Kingdom citizenship.
O'Farrell attended North Berwick High School before going on to study at Murray Edwards College and Emmanuel College. She writes in English and works as a writer. Her fiction has attracted recognition from literary institutions across several countries, including honors originating in the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, and France.
Among the awards O'Farrell has received are the Somerset Maugham Award, the Premio Arcebispo Xoán de San Clemente de novela estranxeira, and the Prix Libraires en Seine Corinne-Kim. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. These distinctions reflect the range of critical and institutional engagement her work has generated across different national literary cultures.
In 2020, O'Farrell won the fiction prize at the National Book Critics Circle Awards. She has additionally received the Women's Prize for Fiction. The combination of these honors, drawn from British, American, Spanish, and French literary organizations, marks the breadth of critical recognition her writing has accumulated over the course of her career.
Quotes by Maggie O'Farrell
That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.
He can feel Death in the room, hovering in the shadows, over there beside the door, head averted, but watching all the same, always watching. It is waiting, biding its time. It will slide forward on skinless feet, with breath of damp ashes, to take her, to clasp her in its cold embrace, and he, Hamnet, will not be able to wrest her free.
Love is not changed by death and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest.
And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child’s pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.
I find,′ he says, his voice still muffled, ’that I am constantly wondering where he is. Where he has gone. It is like a wheel ceaselessly turning at the back of my mind. Whatever I am doing, wherever I am, I am thinking: Where is he, where is he? He can’t have just vanished. He must be somewhere. All I have to do is find him. I look for him everywhere, in every street, in every crowd, in every audience. That’s what I am doing, when I look out at them all: I try to find him, or a version of him.
But there is nothing. A high whine of nothing, like the absence of noise when a church bell falls silent.
She would try anything, she would do anything. She would open her own veins, her own body cavity, and give him her blood, her heart, her organs, if it would do the slightest good.
She is like no one you have ever met. She cares not what people may think of her. She follows entirely her own course.” He sits forward, placing his elbows on his knees, dropping his voice to a whisper. “She can look at a person and see right into their very soul. There is not a drop of harshness in her. She will take a person for who they are, not what they are not or ought to be.” He glances at Eliza. “Those are rare qualities, are they not?
