Maggie O'Farrell

Maggie O'Farrell is one of those writers whose prose is just stunning—she has a real gift for getting inside the heads of her characters and making you feel every bit of their joy and heartbreak. She was born in Northern Ireland, and her childhood involved quite a few moves, which I think gives her a very unique perspective on home and belonging. Her novel Hamnet, which imagines the short life of Shakespeare’s son, was a massive sensation and won the Women's Prize for Fiction. She also wrote an incredibly moving memoir called I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, where she explores different near-death experiences throughout her life. She is brilliant at blending historical settings with very raw, human emotions.