{"id":511477,"date":"2026-05-31T09:11:20","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T09:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/511477\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T09:11:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T09:11:20","slug":"hamnets-maggie-ofarrell-i-turned-down-an-obe-because-i-didnt-want-british-empire-as-part-of-my-name-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/511477\/","title":{"rendered":"Hamnet\u2019s Maggie O\u2019Farrell: \u2018I turned down an OBE because I didn\u2019t want British Empire as part of my name\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maggie O\u2019Farrell shows me a picture of her<\/a> great-great grandfather, Tom\u00e1s, standing behind a British<\/a> redcoat and a measuring instrument called a theodolite. She discovered the thumbnail painting by accident one day when she took a picture of a map drawn by Tom\u00e1s\u2019s son, Liam, and \u201cjust randomly blew it up\u201d on her phone. The map had been on the wall in her parents\u2019 house, but they hadn\u2019t spotted the tiny political vignette it carried. \u201cI was so astonished. He\u2019s been hiding in plain sight all these years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Land, her vivid tenth novel<\/a>, draws on the life and work of Tom\u00e1s, who was employed on the Ordnance Survey project to map Ireland after the Famine, and Liam, her great-grandfather, who left the Jesuits to become a mapper, \u201ca really weird trajectory\u201d.<\/p>\n

Set largely in a post-Famine western peninsula, Land brings to life a scarred, colonised world of workhouses, mass emigration and other brutalities in which the earth itself seems to retain the memory of ancient violence. It is a book the Coleraine-born O\u2019Farrell has long wanted to write.<\/p>\n

When we meet in the bar of Dublin\u2019s Merrion Hotel, she is fresh off a flight and orders herbal tea \u2013 she doesn\u2019t drink \u201ctea tea\u201d \u2013 and a scone that turns out to be three scones. (Later, after I decline, she brings the other two up to her 22-year-old son, who has accompanied her on the trip.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the first interview she has sat down for as part of the publicity tour for Land, which means she\u2019s \u201cnot on autopilot\u201d, she says. She likes the promotional side of a writer\u2019s life, in any case. \u201cYou get to talk to people about books. What could be better, really?\u201d<\/p>\n

Over our tea and scones, we discuss her relationship to Ireland, why she turned down an OBE, the legacy of her childhood encephalitis, two upcoming film adaptations of her books and the \u201ccompletely bonkers\u201d experience of going to this year\u2019s Oscars after she was nominated for best adapted screenplay for Hamnet, her eighth novel.<\/p>\n

But first we delve into Land, for which she \u201cwent down such a massive rabbit hole\u201d, plunging into archives to find traces of Tom\u00e1s and discern the truth in what had become a \u201cvague family myth\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I looked at the records, I realised my great-great grandfather had started working with the Ordnance Survey in 1848. You see that date and it just kind of pulls you up short. What on earth must that have been like?\u201d<\/p>\n

Ireland had \u201cundergone this cataclysm\u201d and the maps from the original survey, first established in 1824, had to be revised.<\/p>\n

\"MaggieMaggie O’Farrell: ‘There\u2019s this huge vacancy and silence as to what happened to a lot of people.’ Photograph: Chris Maddaloni <\/p>\n

\u201cI imagine it was quite a fraught job to take. You know, it was a project run by the British army, so it was not straightforward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tom\u00e1s, like other Irish surveyors, was listed as a \u201clabourer\u201d, though he was clearly skilled, and it was only after he transferred to Scotland that he could put his name to his work. O\u2019Farrell eventually found his signature, and his elegant descriptions of castles, loughs and churches, in the archives in Edinburgh, a mile down the road from where she lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe described a ruin as having been \u2018much injured by time and the hand of man\u2019. And I just thought that was a beautiful sentence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Themes of separation and reunion, restraint and freedom \u2013 recurring O\u2019Farrell subjects \u2013 are also present in her absorbing account of the emigration of Enda and Rose, Liam\u2019s sisters in the book. She has resolved to avoid explaining \u201cwhere the facts stop and where the fiction starts\u201d, but says that as much as the real father and son were her starting points, Land is, ultimately, a novel.<\/p>\n

Tackling this loss-defined stretch of Irish history was not without its complications. She cites a line from Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn\u2019s 1998 essay Erasures in which he asked, \u201cHow do you write about the Famine?\u201d She asked herself the same question.<\/p>\n

\"AA picture of Maggie O’Farrell’s great-great grandfather, Tom\u00e1s, standing behind a British redcoat and a measuring instrument called a theodolite. Photograph: Maggie O’Farrell <\/p>\n

\u201cYou read the historical records and the workhouse records and, I mean, it\u2019s so horrifying, it does kind of render you to inarticulacy. And, actually, we can see things like the coffin ship lists, the emigration lists, the workhouse lists but in between there\u2019s this huge vacancy and silence as to what happened to a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Farrell was born in 1972, four months after Bloody Sunday, and left Ireland when she was two, \u201cbecause of the Troubles\u201d, when her father, a Dubliner who was lecturing in economics in Derry, was offered a job at the University of Wales in Cardiff.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think my parents ever thought we would be leaving for good,\u201d she says, adding that her dad, now 85, still hasn\u2019t ruled out going back. The family \u2013 she is the middle of three sisters \u2013 eventually settled in North Berwick, a coastal town a short train ride from Edinburgh.<\/p>\n

I tell her I\u2019ve been there, observing that it\u2019s not a big place.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, not at all,\u201d she says, laughing. \u201cThough it\u2019s a lot bigger than it used to be. I really did walk to school through fields, you know, with cows in.\u201d<\/p>\n

She loved history, though she encountered \u201cshocking\u201d gaps in the British curriculum. \u201cWe were taught two things about the Famine in my Scottish comprehensive. One was that it was caused by potato blight and the other one was that Queen Victoria gave her own personal money,\u201d she says, her laughter acquiring an incredulous tone. \u201cWhich is true, but it was a very tiny amount. I mean, the Sultan of Turkey gave more, put it that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"MaggieMaggie O’Farrell at the Oscars in Los Angeles in March. Photograph: Julian Hamilton\/Getty <\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until her sixth novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, set in London in the summer of 1976, that she zeroed in on Irish characters. The plot of This Must Be the Place, meanwhile, unfolds in Donegal, but only in part, making Land her most Irish book by some distance.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am nervous about it. I don\u2019t want to feel as though I am standing on anyone\u2019s turf. It certainly worried me throughout the book, whether I would get it right, in a sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

I suggest there is still plenty of room on this particular turf. The Famine is, if anything, underwritten about.<\/p>\n

She praises Paul Lynch\u2019s novel Grace, which \u201cslightly reconfigured\u201d her brain \u2013 \u201cIt\u2019s devastating, but it should be devastating, shouldn\u2019t it?\u201d \u2013 and says she really admires Joseph O\u2019Connor\u2019s Star of the Sea, while she also references Translations, Brian Friel\u2019s \u201cbrilliant\u201d play about the 19th century anglicisation of Irish placenames. She was surprised when her husband, the British novelist William Sutcliffe, told her he studied it for A-level.<\/p>\n

Land has a folkloric dimension, inspired by the Irish myths her father read to them as children.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe used to find it annoying. But they\u2019re amazing stories aren\u2019t they? In those myths, the land is kind of sentient in a way. Trees are alive, stones talk. There\u2019s this whole sense that the first inhabitants dissolved themselves into the land, and that\u2019s why the land has personality and opinions, and often quite difficult opinions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those bedtime stories, which she now understands were part of her father\u2019s way of staying connected to home, have \u201cdefinitely fused\u201d in her imagination with her summers in Ireland. Those holidays, spent with aunts in Donegal and Galway and her grandparents in Dublin, felt \u201clike coming back to where we belong\u201d, she says.<\/p>\n

\n

I don\u2019t want to be one of those people who claims Irish heritage<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Maggie O’Farrell<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t easy to be an Irish family in Britain in the 1970s and 80s. At school, when relations were bad, people said horrible things to us all the time, and this was not just coming from the kids, it was from the teachers as well,\u201d she says. One teacher, she has said before, asked her if her family were in the IRA<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She has also previously spoken about how \u201cIrish-British\u201d, as a means of denoting Irish people in Britain, isn\u2019t a common expression the way Irish-American is across the Atlantic. \u201cIt\u2019s problematic,\u201d she says. Edinburgh has been her home for 15 years and it\u2019s where her son and two daughters have grown up. But they\u2019re \u201ca bit confused as well\u201d, she thinks. She had to renew her daughters\u2019 Irish passports recently and they were delighted to get them back.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t really know, that\u2019s the answer,\u201d she concludes on the question of how she identifies herself. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be one of those people who claims Irish heritage, even though I have it and I was born here. It\u2019s difficult, I think.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet Ireland is \u201ca very important part\u201d of who she is. \u201cWhen we were landing this morning, my son said I seemed really excited.\u201d<\/p>\n

She has won many awards over the course of her writing career, including the Costa Novel Award in 2010 for The Hand That First Held Mine and the Women\u2019s Prize for Fiction in 2020 for Hamnet. There was one accolade, however, that she could not accept.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the seeds for Land was that I was offered an OBE and I turned it down,\u201d she reveals.<\/p>\n

The full title of the honour is Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was thinking about why it was I didn\u2019t want it, and the first thing was that I didn\u2019t want \u2018British Empire\u2019 as part of my name. And the second was I said to myself, \u2018Well, if [notoriously laissez-faire British overseer] Charles Trevelyan has it, I don\u2019t want it.\u2019 He was given a knighthood after he called the Famine an act of God, and he still has it. They haven\u2019t revoked it, and they should. I thought I can\u2019t be part of an honours system that honours him.\u201d<\/p>\n

What the \u201cE\u201d stands for has proven an obstacle for several well-known British people, I note.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I think it\u2019s time, high time, actually, for them to rethink that,\u201d she says of the honour names. \u201cObviously people accept it and I don\u2019t feel hostile towards them, but I just couldn\u2019t do it for those two reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AuthorAuthor Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Hamnet made me realise that who your collaborators are is absolutely crucial.’ Photograph: Chris Maddaloni <\/p>\n

Her work has been celebrated this year in another sphere: Hollywood. O\u2019Farrell, who wrote the screenplay for Hamnet alongside the film\u2019s director, Chlo\u00e9 Zhao, now has nominations for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a Bafta on her CV.<\/p>\n

Being swept up by the international film awards season was \u201cso mental, honestly\u201d, she says. \u201cIt was just such a mad experience. It\u2019s so, so different from the books world. If you\u2019re just dipping your toe in it, as I was, it\u2019s kind of fascinating in an anthropological way to see it all up close, to see the mechanisms of it and the armies of people who walk around the outside of the frame, so to speak, and also the pressure on people, particularly women, to look a certain way and be a certain way.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Some films leave me with memories lasting for years. Hamnet will be one of thoseOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

At the Oscars, she was one of the early arrivals on the red carpet. \u201cWe were given a slot,\u201d she says. Her husband accompanied her to the Baftas, but she brought her agent and friend, Victoria Hobbs, to Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had quite a laugh. It\u2019s just so bonkers, it really is. Completely bonkers.\u201d<\/p>\n

She doesn\u2019t drink, as it might affect her \u201cshaky motor control\u201d, as she refers to it in her memoir, but as the ceremony is held in daylight hours and \u201ceverybody is wearing dresses that cost Christ knows what\u201d, there\u2019s not a lot of alcohol around the Oscars anyway. \u201cIt\u2019s not very wild,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Still, she was enthralled by the \u201cexcellent people-watching\u201d opportunities at the Vanity Fair after-party. \u201cAnd the frocks, as well. I love clothes. Seeing people in their frocks close up was all really interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

I think if you get Paul Mescal, you might as well use him. I always wanted it to be Paul<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Maggie O’Farrell<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She\u2019s far from done with film. A screen adaptation of The Marriage Portrait, her exquisite ninth novel, set in 16th century Italy, will be produced by Dublin\u2019s Element Pictures and directed by French film-maker Audrey Diwan. \u201cWe\u2019ve had Zoom chats. She\u2019s great,\u201d says O\u2019Farrell.<\/p>\n

She hasn\u2019t written this script, but she would like to adapt Land, which is poised to be made by Hamnet producer Liza Marshall and her London-based company Hera Pictures. \u201cWe haven\u2019t decided yet \u2013 it\u2019s very early days \u2013 but I think I would find it really hard to let this one go into someone else\u2019s hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not every author emerges from the screenplay process unscathed, but she enjoyed working with Zhao.<\/p>\n

\u201cHamnet made me realise that who your collaborators are is absolutely crucial. A lot of my friends who are authors have had these experiences where it just gets pulled away from them. Someone else\u2019s vision is stamped on it, and it ends up not being theirs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"O’FarrellO\u2019Farrell with actors Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal and director Chlo\u00e9 Zhao at the Irish premiere of Hamnet in the Lighthouse cinema, Dublin, in December. Photograph: Barry Cronin <\/p>\n

She initially told Zhao that she didn\u2019t want to co-write the screenplay. \u201cBut she\u2019s very persuasive, Chlo\u00e9. She was just very determined. She held the book up to the camera and said, \u2018I just want to make this. This. I want to make this!\u201d I thought, \u2018Ooh.\u2019 We were doing a Zoom call, and because I knew she was an Oscar-winning director, I thought I was going to be seeing a Bel Air mansion or maybe an infinity pool, but actually she came on and her hair was all sort of wet. She\u2019d been surfing and I think she was in a kind of mobile home, and behind her there were lots of dogs wandering about. I instantly thought, \u2018Okay, I can work with you\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zhao\u2019s film is told in a more linear fashion than O\u2019Farrell\u2019s novel, and William Shakespeare features in it more.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think if you get Paul Mescal, you might as well use him,\u201d she says cheerfully. \u201cI always wanted it to be Paul. I said that from the start, partly because I\u2019d seen him playing Stephen Dedalus [in a stage production of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] just after he\u2019d been a student. Paul and Jessie [Buckley], God, what a dream cast. I think I was incredibly lucky.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Buckley won her Oscar for best actress, it was \u201can amazing moment\u201d.<\/p>\n

Hamnet belongs to the select group of 2020-published books that hinged on the suddenly timely matter of grief wrought by contagious disease. O\u2019Farrell had intended to write it years before she did but found herself in the unanticipated grip of a memoir.<\/p>\n

She was more nervous about 2017\u2019s I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death than she was about any other book, she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cPartly because it was a different thing, a different genre, but also I\u2019m quite a private person, really. It never occurred to me that I would write a memoir. But I\u2019ve always kind of felt that you don\u2019t necessarily choose a book, they choose you. Not in a mystical way. It\u2019s just that you have to learn to pay attention to the one that\u2019s tugging at your sleeve most insistently.\u201d<\/p>\n

She thinks that \u201cin a weird way\u201d she needed to write about her brushes with death before she could write Hamnet. \u201cLooking back, that\u2019s how I feel about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

One chapter recounts how she contracted encephalitis \u2013 a viral inflammation of the brain \u2013 aged eight and the terrifying pain, strange medical procedures and lengthy rehabilitation that followed.<\/p>\n

She has got used to the lingering consequences, which range from a weak left arm and occasional stammer to poor balance and spatial disorientation. She can be vulnerable to sensory overload, and she sleeps with a light on, so she doesn\u2019t fall if she has to get out of bed at night.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt means I can\u2019t wear high heels, but there are definitely worse things. And I have to be careful on stairs. I was trying to put my passport back in my pocket as I was coming downstairs there, and I thought, \u2018Okay, no. One thing at a time.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AuthorAuthor Maggie O’Farrell: ‘I love clothes. Seeing people in their frocks close up was all really interesting.’ Photograph: Chris Maddaloni <\/p>\n

The after-effects she describes will be relatable to people with motor and vestibular issues that are largely invisible to others yet extremely material to their lives. She has \u201ca feeling it\u2019ll probably get worse\u201d as she gets older, she says, but she will manage it, as she has for decades. \u201cIt means nothing, it means everything,\u201d she writes in I Am, I Am, I Am.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0If you loved Hamnet, here are five other great Maggie O\u2019Farrell readsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The time arrives for the most delicate question in any author interview. What is she working on now?<\/p>\n

She has abandoned an earlier plan to write about ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev and dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, who she spent time researching in Paris before embarking on Land.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was really into it, but then I started writing it and it didn\u2019t have a pulse,\u201d she says. The problem, she thinks, is that the story already exists, and she is not a biographer.<\/p>\n

About the other ideas she is \u201ctrying out\u201d, she will say no more. \u201cI never talk about it until I\u2019ve finished it. Not even to my husband.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the meantime, O\u2019Farrell\u2019s loyal readers have Land to explore. It intrigues her how humans were mapping before they could write and how, over the centuries, maps became expressions of power and ownership. \u201cI suppose I wanted to think about that. And also I wanted to tell a story about the whole country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Land by Maggie O\u2019Farrell is published on June 2nd by Tinder Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Maggie O\u2019Farrell shows me a picture of her great-great grandfather, Tom\u00e1s, standing behind a British redcoat and a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":511478,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[221764,49584,15770,31872,18,41787,117,19,17,24510,361,73038,7012,23432,56377],"class_list":["post-511477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-audrey-diwan","tag-brian-friel","tag-chloe-zhao","tag-colm-toibin","tag-eire","tag-element-pictures","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jessie-buckley","tag-magazine","tag-maggie-o-farrell","tag-oscars","tag-paul-mescal","tag-william-shakespeare"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116668418483986982","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/511478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}