YouSaid · the spoken record

Maggie O’Farrell

lines on the record: 38
first: 2026-07-12
most recent: 2026-07-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't know. I mean, I never, ever thought I'd write a memoir at all. In fact, I used to joke about it with my husband who used to say you're as likely to do that as you are to ever write memoir. I don't know. You never know. Never know where it's going to take you next.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's funny, someone asked me that question the other day, a friend of mine, and I said, no, it's been totally fine. And my husband said, well, what about the car accident? And I said, So, spoiler alert, the car accident was okay in the end, but yeah, my daughter and I were hit by a visitor from Uruguay who had just been on an international all-night flight and just hired a car and was driving up the wrong side of the road. So that was, I mean, it wasn't really, but the policeman did say to me if you hadn't been driving, I'm not going to say a certain brand of car because this isn't an advertisement, it might have been different. So I'm only ever going to drive this certain brand of car now. But apart from that, fingers crossed touching wood, it's been okay.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This book, I don't use their real names and I don't always want to talk to mark where the joins are, this bit's true, but that's not true, and this is a bit I made up or this is a bit I didn't make up because I feel that they should be like, I mean, just like I said, I'd feel like they should be probably left in peace and they didn't really ever expect me to come along and start digging up things about them. But I think it's a decision you have to make. And also probably need to talk to our family. I mean, I'm very far obviously from their only living relatives. So I've got many cousins and I tried to talk to as many of them and my siblings as possible just to say I'm going to write this book. Is it okay with you and just to kind of include people and just to say what do you know of them and how would you feel about it?”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I mean, I try, I think my rule was to find out as much as I possibly could and not to try to ignore something that didn't quite fit with the story I wanted to tell. You had to kind of find a way to weave it in. But I think it is. I think there is an interesting responsibility with if you're going to use fact as a kind of starting point or a springboard for fiction. I think you'd have to decide. But one of the reasons why”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think you have writing about anyone who was real, whether they're your relative or not, you have a responsibility towards them. I definitely felt that. Writing this and writing Hamlet and writing the marriage portrait, which are based on real people. And I was always really conscious of that. And also, you know, and I think if you're writing a biography of someone or a history book, which I could never do, I don't have the skills for that, but I think that's a different thing. I think then you are on a bound to dig up everything you can and use everything you can. But I think with fiction,”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think generally literary wards are a very good thing. I mean, as a reader, I think they're amazing at sometimes suggesting and promoting work that you wouldn't necessarily pick up. It's wonderful to look at a shortlist for, I don't know, the book or the women's prize or Costa or whatever it is and you think, oh, I haven't heard of that book and then you want to go and investigate it. So I think they're great at kind of opening you out to new books. And certainly when you're given one, it's a really very nice phone call to get. But I think you always have to hang on to the fact that, I mean, I've been on the other side of it as a judge in enough times to know that actually it is pretty, it's a bit like we're in the lottery, it is a bit of luck as well. It just depends on the people in the room and whether they happen to like a book and which way the conversation goes. But I mean they're a brilliant way of”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just think, and I was so cross that I threw the book across the room. So I think one of the things I wanted to achieve with the book was a kind of kind of keep them in the present tense, to say these people, yes, the world has changed, but actually I don't think human hearts and minds have changed that much at all. And this boy's death was hugely significant to his family. And that without him we wouldn't have Hamlet and we wouldn't have 12th night.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think with Hannah, I was trying to collapse down the distance between these people and us. I think the world changes. Unrecognizably if they came to our world, they'd be horrified by the noise. And I think one of the exercises for me anyway was trying to, I mean, the reason why I wanted to write it in the first place, the kind of engine behind it for me was that I always felt that Hamlet wasn't the boy, wasn't well known enough, and that he'd been relegated to a footnote. And also I was really cross that every time I read a biography of Shakespeare, he only got maybe one or two mentions. And often his death was wrapped up in these really, I think, quite offensive statistics about child mortality as if the implication was that it wasn't really that upsetting because they were more used to it. And I just refused to believe that. I refused to believe that any point in history is anything less than catastrophic to lose a child. But also one really respected Shakespearean, which I'm not going to tell you who it was, actually wrote the sentence, it's impossible to know whether or not Shakespeare grieved when Hamlet died.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to wait for an ad break. There's a lot of ad breaks. There's an award, and then there's an ad break where everybody's Mills of Abandon chats to their friends and has a wee, and then you have to be back in your seat. And if you leave your seat and you're not back in it, you get a seat filler. I was really surprised. I started chatting to Bond next to him and they were kind of, why are you talking to me? I just thought it was, yeah, so if you leave your seat so they can't have any. So all these people who wait in the corridor in evening wear and they ushered in to sit in. I mean, it's the weirdest experience.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I had my plus one, who's my agent. Yeah, we went together, which is very lucky. And we actually had a picnic in the car because someone told us that there's no food, which is true. By the time it ends at 9.30, everybody is so hungry that they would eat the upholstery.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really odd. All the men are tiny. I felt like a giant. Well, I had a weird experience. This is a kind of illustration of how odd it is to go, as a civilian, that I was in a kind of, I was waiting in one of the kind of aisles of the auditorium, and there was people talking behind me, and I thought, it's so strange, that man sounds exactly like George Clooney. And then I thought, that's because it is actually George Clooney. He's very handsome up close, so I can testify. It's not really a shocking, controversial statement, is it?”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And all you say is about 50 lenses going on. We don't want to take a photograph, which is totally fine by me. But it's just very, very strange.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it's really hard to describe. I mean, the Oscars is just a really weird day out. And it's incredibly long. You start getting ready for it at about nine in the morning, just after breakfast. So you have your breakfast and then you're putting on your evening dress. And you have to go, you get in your car and then you queue in your car to get into the right road and then you queue in the road to go through. And the security is... I mean, you think airport security is strict. I mean, it's much more difficult to get into the Oscars and your dog, the car has to be sniffed by a sniffer dog, and then you finally go through. But the funny thing about going to the red car as a middle-aged writer is that they say to you, come and stand on this spot here and then you do. And all the photographers just go, oh.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I mean, you have to go there. And I actually wrote that novel mostly during lockdown. So I was completely dragged at home and I needed to go. So I went to Florence's suit. I mean, I had been around it before. We used to live near Florence a long time ago, so I'd been to the palace. But yeah, as soon as travel restrictions lifted, I went around. It was really empty. It was amazing. I've never seen Florence.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's nothing that forces me. I mean, there's nothing that leads me to put down a historical novel faster if I feel that I'm being treated to a lecture on Baker Lite being an early form of plastic. I mean, I'm interested in that, but I don't want to see it in a novel.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I don't when I sit down to write a novel set in the past, I don't consciously think, and now I shall write a historical capital N. And I try to just approach it as I would any other story. And I think, I mean, the thing about writing novels set in the past, there's an awful lot of research you have to do in order to create a scene and, I don't know, a cottage in 19th century Island or a palazzo in 16th century Florence, you need to know so much before you can start writing. You have to know what people are wearing, what their clothes are made of, what the floor is made of, if there's a cup on the table, what's the cup made of? What are the windows look like? How does the light come through? You need to know all that. But actually in the final edit of the scene, you need to make sure that maybe only 2% of that is showing because otherwise it just reads like someone who's trying to show that they've been to a library.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I haven't been involved in a screenplay for that. I was writing Hamlet and I couldn't take on another one. And she's a writer director, so I was very happy for her to take that on. I'm not sure what's happening with it now. And it seems to be getting close, but I'll have to let you know.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Yes, it is, yeah. So that's with a French Lebanese director, Audrey Delin. And she's writing a screenplay. I don't think I haven't even seen the screenplay yet. But it's quite several Zoom calls with her, and I think she has a really good feeling for the story. And yeah, it's quite exciting.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two scenes down the line this character's motivation is completely unclear and it affects. So it was just, we sort of passed it back and forth between us. And I think the big joy for me about the film, I mean, I suppose I would say, you know, the book is my baby and it's exactly how I wanted it to be and it always will be. And the film is different from the book. And it should be. I think if you go into the process expecting it to be a replica, I mean, it can't be because it's a completely different medium and the language of cinema is so different from the written language. But you have to expect it to be someone else. The film is Chloe's and it feels like a non-identical twin to the book.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it never felt like I had to fight, really, not because I'm saying I agreed on everything, which wouldn't be, but it was never a process where I felt that I was handing it over to her or relinquishing it to her in a way. I mean, I think partly because the way she works is very collaborative anyway. She arrived at the process. Obviously, she had a lot of experience bringing stories to the screen, but she arrived at the process with quite a clear idea about which elements of the novel she wanted to retain for the film. And I was able to say, yes, but if you pull on that thread,”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a screenplay by its very nature has to be collaboration. So you strip, you know, you strip everything, all the detail, all the nuance. What people are wearing, what it looks like, all the emotion you take it all out and it's just down to its very bare bones and then on set of course you rely on your collaborators to put it all back in. You know, your costume designers, your set designers, the actors, cinematographers, the lighting designers, all that detail that you've taken out is put back in again. So it feels like a completely different document”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. I mean, actually, I was writing the screenplay for Hamna with Chloe Jan, the director. And this, I was sort of moving back and forth at one point, not throughout the whole process, but I find that it uses completely different muscles as to writing fiction. I mean, you'd think on paper it would be quite similar, but it's really not. I mean, I've never written a screenplay that's original, you know, from scratch. I've only ever done the adaptation of a book that was mine. It's so different. You start with a 350-page novel and you have to winnow it right down to 90 pages, so you have to, and a screenplay is completely predicated and prepared for collaboration, where a novel is just you and the page, you know, novelists alone wool.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not control. I think because this one, no, because actually there were other books of mine that I've been quite happy to say, go for it. But I think this one feels so personal. And I think If you're going to write about the great feminine, it's got to be handled in a very particular way. I don't know. I feel quite responsible. They didn't ask for their great-great-granddaughter to write a novel about them. Oh, so you did come back and haunt me if I hand them over to a screenwriter. Who knows? You did a pretty good job of.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, we've been talking about this. I think, I mean, it's very early days, and there's nothing kind of decided yet, but I think I'd find it really hard. It would have to be a complete.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just scrapped it all and I realized I had to start with the boy. And I think that was the point in this. Sometimes if you get the first sentence, you think, okay, I need to start there. They need to be mapped.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a big question. I don't know. I don't really think about things. I find the word career when applied to a writer is a bit mad. It feels like the anti-career if you choose to write novels. It doesn't feel like someone who's really that interested in careers. I don't know. I mean, I think for whatever reason, it just was the right point in my life and the right point in the story. You know, I think the first decision you have to make with a novel is where in the kind of chronology If you imagine the chronology of it like a river, the first decision you need to make, one of the most important decisions is where in the river you step in. Do you step in right by the estuary and go back to the source or do you step in the source or halfway through? Sometimes that's really stymied me for a long time before I can start another. It's stymied me with Hamlet. I had written some of it before a few years before and it was the wrong point in the river.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, in fact, one point my editor said, hang on, are they speaking Irish in this scene? I said, Of course. You don't need to know that. It's fine. Yeah, it's not important.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there are certain times, maybe actually. I think maybe one of the drafts I did specify and then I changed my mind. Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to put things in italics. Italics upset me, especially in Tyler. I mean, I like italics, but I think changing the form on the page, I think that writing should imply the italics rather than them be there.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I was once writing a book, I think it was the hand that first held mine, and I'd begun it, and it was in the first person present tense, as in I Eat or I Sit. And what I noticed was that every day when I sat down to start writing, I would automatically begin writing in third person past tense, so she ate, she sits. And after a while I thought, what's going on? Why do I keep doing that? And I read over the pages and I thought I've done it wrong. It needs to be the instinct is the right decision. It needs to be third person pattern. So I spent a really dull week changing every eye to she and every, but it had to happen. It was just wrong. It was like wearing a really tight pair of shoes. It just felt wrong.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't love chapters actually as a kind of way of organising a narrative. I think I could be wrong actually, but I think I've only written one book where I use chapters, and that's because it was multiple points of view, and I suppose this one's multiple points of view. Yeah, I find them sometimes, I mean, I'm not saying that I don't like reading novels which are in chapters. I'm very happy for other people to use them, but it didn't feel like the right form for the book. I mean, you know, I often leave decisions about things like that up to the kind of what Rudyard Kipling called the wrong side of his head things like tense and case and the way the story needs to be arranged on the page. I often think it's something that the I mean I don't kind of consciously make those decisions. I usually wait and see what's going to happen. Sometimes I think the story will tell you what it needs.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. Well, I think that goes back to the Irish myth that I was trying to kind of use the sort of tropes from those in the novel. But also, you know, early maps, I think, were described as a bird's eye view. So I had to have burden looking down on the people because that's the kind of form of mapping in itself.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stands out in them is that the land is animate, it has a voice and it has an opinions and it can interact with human characters and it can change the course of their lives. So often trees speak or rivers or wells have people or spirits or ghosts, whatever you want to see them living in them. So there is a kind of, but then again, you know, I mean, again, it kind of goes back to what I was saying about truth and myth. There are so many giants in Irish myth and Ireland was a country invaded again and again and people settled from Viking countries.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really form a kind of bedrock of my sense of narrative, and they are such particular and strange stories, unrelated to anything else, I think. You know, I think Ireland has one of the best preserved folklore. I think, I don't know, I have a feeling it's something to do with not that Ireland was never invaded by the Romans, unlike a lot of Europe, so its culture and its original stories and deities never were supplanted or mixed in with Roman. Anyway, if that's another story. So, Iris Myth. So, yeah, so those kind of stories and those kind of battles and the giants and the characters and just the kind of whole atmosphere of those narratives are really part of the way I think about stories. And I really wanted to try and get as much of the atmosphere of those stories into the novel. And one of the things that's always, I think,”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it is. One of the characters is completely nonverbal, and I always knew he would be. I don't want to say who it is because it might be a bit of a spoiler, but I knew that he was going to be someone who wasn't actually going to speak. You could go inside his head quite a lot. And he listens, the most important thing about him is that he listens to what's going on around him. And he hears conversations, but he hears what's really going on in conversations. And he also hears, he hears the land. Yeah, so when I was little My dad would only ever read us Irish myths, which at the time I used to find a bit annoying. We used to beg him to read us Pippi Longstocking or the Moomens, but he's one of those immigrants who's never quite got over leaving Ireland. He still thinks he's going to go back. We have statum Dad, you're 85. He'd be a little bit late. But anyway, so he used to read, he only would ever read Irish myth to us, which other time I did find a bit annoying. But now I'm quite glad he did because those stories...”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of them have been analysed recently, and there's one in County Cork, I think, which has been famous for, I think, probably thousands of years for curing madness. And when he analyses water, they found it had really high levels of lithium. Because there's a lot of truth in myth.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Offering I've always been really fascinated by sacred wells in Ireland everywhere. So you can basically go to any village or any settlement in Ireland and there's usually one roundabout. I mean, some of them are So, yeah, if you want to find when you go to town and usually you can ask, if there's a bookshop, you ask the bookseller, because they tend to know everything, or you ask someone in the pub, or you find a lady who's probably about 70, and you say, where's the local holy well? And some of them have been, quite a lot of them have been kind of co-opted into Christianity, into Catholicism now. So they all go back to kind of really pre-Christian pagan island and to sort of druid times and where people believed in spirits in the water.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I quite like it, though. I like it. I'm doing it. Keep that one. Yeah. Anyway, so the second part of the book does go right back to the Bronze Age on the same peninsula. And I mean, I really love doing it. It's partly inspired by one of my favourite museums in Ireland, which is one of my favorite museums everywhere. It's in Dublin. It's the National Archaeology Museum, which is such a beautiful building, and it's such a beautiful collection. And it's one of the things I love about it is it does, there are objects found in Ireland which tell the whole story. And most of them are found not by archaeologists, but just by people who happen to be digging on their land or digging turf. Anyway, so that protection is very influenced by that museum. So it does go back. And I was really worried when I handed it in. So I've worked with the same editor amazingly and very luckily for almost 30 years now. And when I gave her the manuscript, I was slightly worried that it was going to come back to me with basically WTF in the manuscript. But I mean, she would never write.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I knew that I wanted to write part of the book was going to be about family and part of it was going to be an attempt to tell the story, the whole story of a country via one peninsula and all the people who've lived on it. So I knew that I wanted to go right back in time. So the book, I hope this is an off-putting, the book does go back to Bronze Age Island. There is actually one clause that takes you back to the Ice Age, but it's only one clause, I promise. I was very pleased that it managed to keep it in there. My children call me a Neek. I don't know if anyone knows that word. A Neek? Yeah. Cocotine and nerd and a geek.”
2026-07-12 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell: Land (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT