Break Out Culture With Ed Vaizey by Country and Town House

130. ‘Hamnet’ with Maggie O’Farrell

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Episode notes

The prodigious, award-winning novelist talks to us candidly about her life as a novelist since she first published ‘After You’d Gone’ 23 years ago.  She tells us how she started writing, her inspiration for ‘Hamnet’ and her most recent published novel ‘The Marriage Portrait’.  She describes what it was like to watch ‘Hamnet’ at the RSC and The Garrick, where Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation of the novel is now playing and breaking the theatre’s box office records. 

She also talks about how she’s been shaped by suffering from viral encephalitis as a child and her 17 near brushes with death recounted in her autobiography ‘I am, I am, I am’.  It’s a fascinating insight into the mind and working practices of one of our most popular novelists.

Hamnet is running at The Garrick Theatre until 17th February 2004.