Maggie O’Farrell

And I know some of them, it wasn't by choice, particularly in Ireland, but...

It's such an extraordinary thing to leave your homeland knowing that the people you're saying goodbye to, you will in all likelihood never see them again.

And in a lot of cases, you wouldn't be able to communicate with them again.

If you happen to be literate or if your family happened or friends and family were literate, you could potentially write to them, but that wasn't always the case.

So, yeah, it beggars belief really that you would say goodbye to your friends and family and that was that.

You wouldn't see them again.

Yes, I studied it at school when I was 16 for my Scottish Highers and I absolutely loved it.

I fell for it in a big way and it really got under my skin.

I particularly loved the character of Hamlet, who felt like sort of a brother to me in a sense.

I think he appeals to a certain type of teenager.

Yeah, just teenagers who wear a lot of eye makeup who hang about in graveyards.

And that was definitely me at the time.

I was very lucky in many ways that I had a particularly brilliant English literature teacher called Mr Henderson.

And he told us as we were studying for the play when we were 16 that Shakespeare had a son who'd been called Hamlet and that he died aged 11 and that Shakespeare had gone on four years or so later to write the play Hamlet.

And even though I was a really long way off from being a writer and a parent, this really struck me.

And I remember putting my finger over the L in Hamlet on my school copy and taking it off again, thinking, that's strange because it's the same name.

And I knew that it was hugely significant, that nobody would casually give a play and a prince and a ghost the name of his dead son.

I think the engine behind me writing Hamlet was...

a dissatisfaction with the way Hamlet himself had been treated by scholars and biographers of Shakespeare.

You know, you read these incredible works of scholarship, these huge biographies about Shakespeare, and Hamlet is lucky if he gets maybe one or two mentions.