'Hamnet' earned Maggie O'Farrell an Oscar nod. Now, she tells us about the surprising inspiration for her new book

The Northern Ireland-born, Edinburgh-based writer, who was nominated for an Academy Award for adapting her novel “Hamnet” (with director Chloé Zhao), is currently on tour promoting her 10th novel, “Land,” a story grounded in the relationship between mapmaker Tomás and his apprentice son, Liam, which brought her to TIFF Lightbox for an event with author Claire Cameron.

“Hamnet,” the 2020 winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and an international bestseller, became the film that received the Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award.

“It was such a kind of wild roller-coaster ride of six months promoting the film, and I was only doing about 10 percent of what Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal and Chloé Zhao did,” O’Farrell said. “I dipped in and out. But it was fantastic, and it’s probably never going to happen again, so I enjoyed it.”

O’Farrell took as her guest to the Oscars her literary agent and friend Victoria Hobbs, with whom she’s worked for 30 years. “We had a marvellous time because we hadn’t seen the sun for ages in the U.K.,” the writer said. “Santa Monica locals were quite shocked to see two pale middle-aged women swimming in the sea in late March.”

Of the ceremony itself, O’Farrell noted, “You put on your evening clothes at breakfast and security makes airports look like a walk in the park. All cars get worked by sniffer dogs, guided by machine-gun-toting men.

“And there’s no food at the Oscars. Everybody is so hangry by the time it ends. It’s madness.”

O’Farrell’s initial response to writing the movie adaptation was not to do it. “I’d never done a screenplay, and I was wanting to move on to a new project.”

Things changed when she met director Zhao on Zoom. “I immediately thought, ‘Oh, I could actually work with her. Hearing her talk about ‘Hamnet,’ I knew she was not going to make a conventional costume drama. Chloé’s an amazing person who showed incredible trust with me.

“Maybe when you turn 50 you think, ‘Perhaps I need to learn new skills, to step outside of things I’ve been doing.’ Give it a try.” That new skill certainly paid off.

It’s all relative

“Hamnet” producer Liza Marshall has already optioned “Land.” “Liza is thinking about a feature, not a limited series, and she’s already talking to various directors,” O’Farrell said. “I think I want to write the screenplay and focus on the father/son relationship of Tomás and Liam, although there are certain projects I’m quite happy to let others take on.” Her 2022 Italian Renaissance novel “The Marriage Portrait,” for instance, is currently in development with filmmaker Audrey Diwan and is expected to begin shooting next year.

“Land” is a very personal book that is inspired by O’Farrell’s great-great-grandfather, who worked on the second revision of the British ordinance survey map of Ireland at the end of the Great Famine. (Between 1846 and 1852 more than a million Irish people died and another million emigrated to Australia and North America.) The British needed Irish speakers to communicate with the locals, and men like her great-great-grandfather not only translated conversations but also ensured the Irish place names didn’t get lost.

“Original place names are like tiny poems or tiny histories for that exact place, and they explain why people settled there,” she said, explaining, “The word ‘tobar’ is Irish for ‘well,’ and the word ‘rath’ means ‘a hill fort.’ You see both all over the place.”

O’Farrell always wondered about the people left behind during the famine years and had been thinking about writing the book for a long time. “There’s a kind of myth in our family that we had an ancestor who drew the map of Ireland,” she said. “In my head as a child, he was a sort of one-man band. I’ve always loved maps, and mapping pre-dates writing as a form of storytelling.”

Then, she figured, if she’s going to write a novel about 19th-century Ireland, she must include certain elements: “the Great Famine in the center of it, colonialism, the Church, emigration, music and folklore.”

Of myth and truth

O’Farrell said that it was very important “to transpose as much as possible (the) narrative rules and tropes from Irish folklore into the novel because a lot of the book is an exploration about myth and truth and how much truth there is in myth.”

They were the stories read to her as a child by her Irish father, ones that “formed the bedrock of what stories could be” to her, she said. There were giants, dogs, battles, abductions, sacred wells and love affairs, all elements found in “Land.” “But the landscape,” she said, “is the supreme power — with animals second and humans really a low third. The natural world is in charge, and it can curse or it can bless human life.”

Sacred wells, for instance, stretch back to the pre-Christian time of the druids, when nature was the deity. Even now in Ireland it seems that every village has one. “Sometimes you can ask in the bookshop, or in the pub,” O’Farrell said. “Or you can just ask someone who is 60 or 70, where is the local holy well? And they will tell you a story about going there as a child.”

Recently, a scientist analyzed the waters of a well in County Cork believed for centuries to cure mental illnesses, and discovered that it had high levels of lithium, and another known to treat women’s infertility was found to contain high levels of iron. There is, indeed, truth in myth.

Because the story of colonialism is so old and enormous, O’Farrell never mentions the words “British,” “Irish” or “Ireland” in the book, because she wanted it “to have a kind of universality about occupation and repression.” She also doesn’t identify the peninsula “as one specific place, since I wanted readers to try to imagine the sense of maplessness, which is so unthinkable to us as we wander around with a mini-GPS in our pockets.”

It was, nevertheless, important to O’Farrell to put Canada in the book — characters emigrate to Quebec — because of the beautiful Irish famine memorial on Grosse Île, a place she has visited.

“The idea that the Irish who survived those terrible years at home, then survived the perilous voyage but literally died as they landed, is so horrific and heartbreaking and an informative snapshot of that time and what people went through,” she said. “It was essential for me to honour that.”