An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell

Join us for an evening with Maggie O’Farrell, author of the multi-award-winning book and film Hamnet, as we celebrate the release of her latest novel, Land. 

Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, Land is at once intimate and epic, a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, and persistent ghosts, and a portrait of a family navigating a legacy of upheaval and survival with resilience and love. 

Maggie O’Farrell is the author of nine previous novels, including After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand that First Held Mine, The Marriage Portrait and her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am.

Her novel Hamnet won the Waterstones Book of the Year and the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020. The film of the book, with a screenplay co-written by O’Farrell and director Chloe Zhao, has won numerous awards at film festivals worldwide, and the 2026 Golden Globe for best motion picture. It is also tipped to win at the Oscars in March.

Bobby Palmer is both an author and a journalist. His critically acclaimed debut novel, Isaac and the Egg, was a Waterstones Paperback of the Year in 2022; his second novel, Small Hours, was published in 2024. Bobby co-hosts the podcast Book Chat with Pandora Sykes and his writing has appeared in GQ, Esquire, Men's Health and Cosmopolitan, amongst others.