OFarrell

Essays A writer’s roots A Guest at the Feast Colm Tóibín A Guest at the Feast Colm Tóibín A writer’s roots In one of the essays in A Guest at the Feast, Colm Tóibín declares: “God represents a real problem…

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell has sold more copies than any other title on the 2023 Women’s prize for fiction shortlist in the run-up to the announcement of the winner.The historical novel sold 72,819 copies by the first week of June, according to trade magazine The Bookseller. The winner of the Women’s prize – which rewards the best novel from the past year written by a woman and published in the UK – is due to be revealed on Wednesday at a ceremony in London.Louise Kennedy’s debut novel Trespasses came in…

More than half of this year’s longlist for the Women’s prize for fiction are debuts, with nine first novels, including Trespasses by Louise Kennedy and I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel, up for the £30,000 award. The debut novelists are up against previous Women’s prize-winning authors Maggie O’Farrell, who won in 2020 for Hamnet, and Barbara Kingsolver, who won in 2010 for The Lacuna, and who have been chosen this year for their novels The Marriage Portrait and Demon Copperhead respectively.Past Women’s prize shortlistees…

Earlier this month, Philip Pullman went on a cranky Twitter rant that made me wonder if he too was reading the new Maggie O’Farrell novel. “I don’t care how many people enjoy it, fiction in the present tense is an ABDICATION OF NARRATIVE RESPONSIBILITY,” he tweeted. “I resent having to re-calibrate my entire attitude to time whenever I open a novel in the present tense. Away with them!”The Marriage Portrait, like O’Farrell’s 2020 runaway bestseller, Hamnet, is written in a lavish if rather solemn present tense that tries…

Here is a novel inspired by a poem describing a painting portraying a young woman who actually lived. Art and artifice are intrinsic to it. In Maggie O’Farrell’s imagining of 16th-century Italian courtly life, manners make the man, clothes make the woman, and an image is more durable than a person.In 1558, Lucrezia, daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, was married to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. A year after entering her husband’s court in 1560, aged just 16, she died. Poison was suspected. Several portraits of Lucrezia…

Maggie O’FarrellRemind me…Born in Northern Ireland and now living in Edinburgh, O’Farrell published her first novel, After You’d Gone, to critical acclaim in 2000 and won a Betty Trask award. In 2020 she won the Women’s prize for fiction for her novel Hamnet, which imagined the short life of Shakespeare’s son. She has also written a bestselling memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am. The Marriage Portrait is her ninth novel. New book in a nutshellSet in the gilded world of Florence in the 1560s, The Marriage Portrait tells the story of…

On the third day of a Covid infection, I have a very vivid dream. In it, I am being pushed in a wheelchair down a long windowless corridor. Above my head is a string of oblong fluorescent lights and, as I move through their weak circles of illumination, I’m disconcerted to find that I’m wearing a particular purple dressing gown, about which everything is familiar: the row of pearlised buttons, its fuzzy nap, each ribbed cuff. I know where I am: the basement of a hospital in which I spent a long time as a child while…