Maggie O’Farrell

speaker

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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

So he became a Jesuit and then he

He left, which in Ireland was an enormous deal.

To leave the church in Ireland, you're risking being a social outcast, really.

So he left and he came full circle and became a mapper, just like his father.

So that relationship between the two of them has always really fascinated me.

And also, when I went to the archives in Dublin, I realised that my great great grandfather had been working on the Ordnance Survey revision of Ireland, just in the later years of the Great Famine.

So it was obvious why they needed to make these revisions because the famine had completely reconfigured the country, you know, a million people had died, more than that had been forced to emigrate.

And so that's why they needed to revise the maps.

And I was just imagining what must it have been like to be taking on that task, to be making revisions of the map of Ireland, taking into account the disaster that had happened.

So that, I think, you know, for me, a lot of novels start with a question.

And that was, for me, what on earth must that task have been like to undertake?

I don't know.

It's really hard.

I've been thinking about them both for a long time and researching what I could, but there isn't an awful lot that you can find really about either of them.

And I think that's the way, if you like to write fiction, that's the way your brain can work.

You see those gaps in the record as an opportunity to fill in the story with whatever it is you wanted to say.

Well, I think it's – I really enjoyed imagining these people, you know, my forebears and also –

I don't know, sort of filling in the gaps in a way.

And I did really try, particularly, of course, writing about the Great Famine.

I had a huge amount of vertigo about that because it's such an enormous subject and an enormous task.

Showing 21–40 of 1,785 · page 2 of 90