Maggie O’Farrell

I feel like a born novelist.

That's always what I've, only what I've ever wanted to do and what I want to continue doing.

But I think I might, I think I realised doing Hamnet, I was so lucky with the collaboration and the people I was working with then, I realised how important that is with films because it's such a collaborative process.

So hopefully the right people will come along for land.

Thank you so much for having me, Pat.

Yes, with pleasure.

We were always told as a child, as children, you know, and I think all families have their myths that one of our antecedents drew the first ever map of Ireland as if he was just a lone man band, which obviously is very far from the truth.

But I used to imagine, as you can probably tell from the way I speak, I was born in Ireland, but I didn't grow up there.

But we used to come back every summer and I would look out of the window of our little car at, I don't know, Kerry or Donegal or Galway going past.

And I would imagine him as this lone person striding up a mountainside, probably with a kind of 20 centimetre ruler in his hand or something like that.

But obviously that was a complete fantasy.

And I did go looking for him.

slightly more seriously recently.

And I went to the... So the archives in Dublin hold the Ordnance Survey records for Ireland.

And it took me a while to find him because if you work for the Ordnance Survey, which, of course, is a British government, British army-run organisation...

If you worked for them and you were Irish, you weren't allowed to sign your own work.

It had to be signed by a British army officer.

So he was hard to find.

But I did, in a list of labourers, underneath a memorandum about paid leave, I did find his signature.

And it was an extraordinary moment, Pat, because it proved that actually there is a seed of truth in myth.