Maggie O’Farrell

And also a lot of people who were completely dispossessed.

One of the reasons why I don't name the peninsula where the book happens is because I wanted to create that feeling of not quite knowing where you are.

So I want my readers to be sort of mapless in a way.

But also to understand what it must have been like.

So families were separated, children were separated from their parents.

A lot of children who were in workhouses didn't actually know where they were from or who their parents were.

They had no idea.

They were completely dispossessed of their roots and their family and they had no idea where they had come from.

So I think the country after that terrible disaster, political and natural disaster, was unrecognisable to most people.

That's right.

Yeah.

The coastline is all fibrillated.

Well, I spent a lot of time, as I was writing Land, thinking about what it must have meant to map a country for the second time.

He was doing it for the first time.

And also what it means to map.

To map, in some ways, is to assume power.

It can be seen as so many things.

It can be seen as an act of colonization.

And the British Orland Survey were mapping Ireland in order to make taxation easier for them, obviously.

But also, I think when the Auden Survey did their first survey of Ireland, they didn't employ any Irish people.