Unsung Hero

Hamnet, which looks set to take awards season by storm, stars two Irish actors: Paul Mescal as Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his wife Agnes. This is fitting. The Irish influence on the film, which tells the tale of the Shakespeare’s tragic loss of their young son Hamnet, is palpable – which should come as little surprise given that the book on which the movie is based was written by Coleraine-born Maggie O’Farrell.

For the past two decades, O’Farrell has mastered the art of writing about family relationships while spinning a good yarn. Her critically acclaimed books regularly top the international bestseller lists and have been successfully adapted for screen. Yet having spent most of her life in Great Britain, O’Farrell, has never lost her sense of Irishness. Nor has the Cambridge-educated writer shied away from addressing the issue of anti-Irish discrimination both in her public statements and in her fiction. This has made the characters that she depicts and their experiences instantly recognisable to the Irish community in the UK.

Her ability to write about family dynamics with realism, humour and sensitivity has earned O’Farrell an international readership and critical acclaim. Yet such was the trauma of her early years that it is something of a miracle she survived childhood, let alone become a bestselling novelist.

Derry Days

Maggie O’Farrell was born in Coleraine in County Derry on 27 May 1972, less than four months after Bloody Sunday. The O’Farrell family, being Quakers, were at odds with the cultural norms of the predominantly unionist town. Their Quaker commitment to peace and equality was severely tested as the Troubles entered their most violent decade.

Maggie’s sense of being an outsider was further compounded when, at the age of eight, she was hospitalised encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. The life-threatening illness led her to missing a year of school and left her with a pronounced stutter. Adding to her health woes, the young Maggie nearly drowned in the sea as teenager. Growing up an Irish Quaker during the Troubles; coming close to dying, twice; and acquiring a severe speech impediment – this was not the most promising start for the young writer.

Irish in the UK

These traumatic childhood events were dramatized in her third novel The Distance Between Us (2004) and described in her memoir I am, I am, I am (2017). O’Farrell later faced a new type of challenge when her family moved to Wales. It was here that the young O’Farrell was first subjected to anti-Irish discrimination. The experience of prejudice was to have a lasting personal impact on her and her work. When the family first moved to Wales, the young O’Farrell was subject to overt Irish racism. She later recounted how even teachers would ask: “Are your family in the IRA?” in front of the whole class to the 12-year-old O’Farrell. This incident was far from isolated: she and her family were subject to prejudice on a regular basis in the Britain of the 1970s and 1980s.

O’Farrell’s sense of being an Irish outsider was intensified by the fact that she did not have the cultural cushion of going to Catholic school, where teachers fostered a sense of Irish community and tradition. This led to author feeling distinctly Irish but without the traditional support of school, church and community which many Irish people relied upon in the UK. The attitude encapsulated by the old Irish proverb – “Under the shelter of each other, people survive” – was mostly missing from the young O’Farrell’s experience of growing up Irish in the UK. Yet she and her family did hold on to their sense of Irishness in the face of relentless discrimination.

Proudly Irish

The discrimination that she experienced would find a creative outlet in her most Irish of novels, Instructions for a Heatwave (2013). The book centres around the Riordan family, who have moved from Ireland to the UK for work. During the drought of 1976, Robert, the father goes out for a newspaper and does not return. This forces the grown-up children to return to their London home to help their mother Gretta search for their father. During the ensuing search, the family is forced to confront their own relationships with each other and what is missing from them.

The novel is adept at describing the Irish experience in the UK in the 1970s. Britain was a country where casual discrimination and outright racism were commonplace among all sections of society. However, the book also celebrates all those unsung heroes who kept Irish traditions alive, even in the face of the historical anti-Irish prejudice which was further intensified by the IRA’s bombing campaign during that decade.

Unsung Heroes

O’Farrell describes how the novel’s matriarch, Gretta, “Had always done her best to Ireland alive in her London-born children. The girls went to Irish-dancing classes.” Gretta is symbolic of the countless quietly courageous people who kept the traditions alive before Irishness had its cultural renaissance in the 1980s. These were the unsung heroes who established the social clubs and folk clubs, keeping their sense of who they were and where they came from alive even in the face of overwhelming prejudice. O’Farrell uses the drama of the missing father to examine Irishness, observing: “The Irish are good in a crisis…They know what to do, what traditions must be observed, they bring food, casseroles, pies, they dole out tea. They know how to discuss bad news.” Anyone who has grown up in a large extended Irish family will instantly identify with her description of the Riordans.

In an interview for the New York arts & culture magazine Guernica, the novelist said that the book was a way for her to talk to her Ireland. Like literary exiles from Joyce to Beckett, the yearning for Ireland has never left her. The critics hailed the book, and it was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year award in 2014.

Coleraine to Cambridge

O’Farrell, despite the anti-Irish prejudice and her speech impediment, excelled academically, reading English Literature at New Hall, Cambridge. It was there that she met her future husband, the fellow writer William Sutcliffe. However, like most things in O’Farrell’s life, things were not simple. It only after 10 years of friendship that they became a couple. In the intervening decade she worked as a journalist in Hong Kong, and, on her return to the UK, became the deputy literary editor of The Independent on Sunday.

As the new century dawned, O’Farrell, still only in her twenties, published her first book After You’d Gone (2000). The book established her trademark style of being able to write with forensic sensitivity about the complexity of relationships. The novel was greeted with critical acclaim and the awards soon followed with O’Farrell winning the prestigious Betty Trask Award. Remarkably for a such a young writer, her first six books all won literary awards. Yet it was for her seventh book Hamnet (2020) that O’Farrell swept the board of literary awards both in the UK and internationally.

Derry to Stratford

The historical novel retells the tragic tale of the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, Hamnet. The book deals with the aftermath of a child’s death and how the grief impacts on the family. Both husband and wife are so consumed with their own circles of sorrow that their family are nearly torn apart. O’Farrell tells the story with such sensitivity that, although at times unbearable to read, her book is also compulsive page turner. The novel beautifully argues that from the Bard’s greatest sorrow emerged his greatest play, Hamlet, as a tribute to his lost son.

The novel was nominated for five literary prizes across the UK and Ireland, winning three, and for countless awards internationally. The book was such a critical and commercial success that the film rights were quickly snapped up. The film is now in cinemas across the UK and Ireland, and is tipped to win a suite of Oscars (including best screenplay, which O’Farrell co-wrote). O’Farrell, the Irish outsider, has authored a novel about England’s greatest playwright, and in so doing, has established herself as literary heavyweight.

Her range, and the prolific nature of her writing, show no signs of letting up, with her children’s book, The Boy Who Lost His Spark, winning the KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Award in 2023. So the great storyteller has provided us with one extra story, and a good one at that: ‘Maggie O’Farrell: from Coleraine to Oscar acclaim’.

Image credit: Roamingwab via flickr