Maggie O'Farrell

Maggie O'Farrell (born 1972 in Coleraine, Northern Ireland) is an Irish-British novelist and memoirist. Raised in Wales and Scotland after a childhood illness (encephalitis at age eight) that she has said shaped her love of reading, she now lives in Edinburgh.

Her novels include After You'd Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (Costa Novel Award), Instructions for a Heatwave, This Must Be the Place, Hamnet (Women's Prize for Fiction, National Book Critics Circle Award), and The Marriage Portrait.

She has also written the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death and two children's books.