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.

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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.

Appearances

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Sara & Cariad's Weirdos Book Club · Land by Maggie O'Farrell with Maggie O'Farrell · 11 Jun 2026 podcast

It's just that I wanted to write.

It wasn't that I ever thought it was possible.

I never thought I could earn a living from writing.

Do you have any other writers in your family?

no creative stuff no yeah no my mum um was a care assistant and my dad taught economics so no my mum's a big reader there were lots of books in our household and we used to go carol and i were just talking about because i lived in south wales and bridgend she's from where my gang are from yeah so when i spent my time i was born in derry and then we moved um to wales and i was really lucky in that the town we lived in bridgend there was a carnegie library which was just

you know, amazing.

And I don't think I'd be a writer without that, you know, from the philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie.

And so I used to just go every week and they had this amazing Dewey Decimal system and you had all these little kind of very soft cards, three of them, and I'd go along and I'd get three books and then I'd go back the next week and get three books.

So there was a big emphasis on reading in our house.

talented or anything like that this is good yeah i'm crying i always really loved english is my absolute favorite subject it always was and i had really brilliant english teachers i was very lucky my second favorite subject was geography yeah well i thank my geography teacher in the back of this book because there's a lot of my a lot of all his teaching has gone into it but um

Yeah, so I always really liked, I had great, particularly my comprehensive school in Scotland, I had a brilliant teacher called Mr. Henderson.

And he really changed my life.

He really changed the way I saw books and thought about what writers were trying to do.

I think before then I just thought this is a book and this is what it is.

But he was the first person who made me think about what actually was the writer trying to achieve by choosing this word or missing that word out or using this adjective.

Yeah, that they chose these words very specifically and why, what do they want to communicate?

Yeah, I mean, weirdly it happened in lockdown.

Oh yeah, of course.

So it was very kind of...

I literally found out on a Zoom call.

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