Maggie O’Farrell

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1,785 appearances 8 recordings 7 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 14 Jun

Maggie O’Farrell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 7.

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The Book Show · How Maggie O'Farrell's inner 'neek' came out with Land · 14 Jun 2026 podcast

Thank you very much for having me.

It's lovely to be here.

So we always had a myth in our family.

We were told as children that one of our forebears had drawn or worked on the early maps of Ireland.

And when I was a child, I think I imagined him as a kind of one-man band.

I would look out the window of our car at Dingle or Dunedin

Connemara or Donagall, wherever he happened to be, and I'd think, how would one person go about doing that?

But obviously, when I was a bit older, I realised that he was very far from alone.

And when I went to search for him in the archives in Dublin, I realised that, of course, the mapping of Ireland, the Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland, was an enormous project that employed all kinds of people.

So it originally started in the 1820s, but my great-great-grandfather worked on the second revisions of the map of Ireland in the late 1840s, 1850s.

Yes, he was hard to find because if you were Irish and you were employed by the British Ordnance Survey, you were not allowed to sign your own work.

It had to be signed by a British army officer.

So I could see his name.

in lists of labourers, as they were called, on memorandum and payslips and things like that.

But the actual field books and notebooks and draft maps, it was really hard to tell what was his.

And there were some that I would have thought it was maybe his handwriting, but I wasn't entirely sure because if you're Irish, you weren't allowed to sign his own work.

So he was definitely there, but it was hard to identify exactly which field notebooks were his.

I've always been really interested in him and his son, my great-grandfather, who, as in the novel, the son has a really interesting trajectory.

He goes off and becomes a Jesuit, which anyone who knows anything about the Catholic Church, being a Jesuit is not something you just happen to fall into one day.

It's something that you completely dedicate years of your life to train for.

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