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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 7.
Appearances
And it's so important to take something as difficult and tragic as that and to
do it justice, you know, to write about it properly.
And so I really tried a lot of the stories that are in the novel are based on real accounts, first person accounts.
It was very important to me to get it as right as I possibly could, as accurate as I possibly could.
Oh, that's an interesting question.
I mean, I became completely obsessed with mapping as I was writing this novel.
And I realised that...
Mapping, in a sense, is a really, really strong human instinct.
It actually predates our ability to write.
So we were mapping before we were writing.
The earliest ever map is on the wall of a cave.
It's an Iron Age map on the wall of a cave in what's now the Italian Alps in a place called Bedellina.
And somebody at that time was inspired to etch into the rock a really meticulous map of the houses and fields and huts.
And
You know, it's this really strong sense of this is who I am.
This is where I am.
This is my home.
But then you fast forward a thousand years or so and you get to the Roman Empire.
And of course, from that point on, it's impossible to disentangle mapping from colonialism, from a statement of power.
You know, the Romans arrived in a country, they colonized it, they subjugated the people, they built their roads, they built their towns, and then they drew a map to say, this is ours now, belongs to us.
Showing 41–60 of 1,785 · page 3 of 90
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