What a joy to have the amazing Maggie O’Farrell with us today talking about her beautiful book, Land, with Fiona Nisbet. It is a beautifully crafted, deeply layered exploration of family history and trauma.

The audience greatly enjoyed O’Farrell’s stories of how the novel came to be but also a wee sneak peek into her Oscar experience with Hamnet!

Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, this new novel is at once intimate and epic: a portrait of a family navigating a legacy of upheaval and survival with resilience and love.

Land is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts and a particularly loyal dog. It’s also a story about place, and how layers of history change landscapes and the people who live in them.

Maggie O’Farrell is the author of nine previous novels, including Hamnet which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020. Now an acclaimed film, Maggie co-wrote the screenplay with Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao. The film has won two Golden Globes and an Oscar!