'Hamnet' novelist Maggie O'Farrell maps her Irish roots in 'Land'

Maggie O'Farrell’s new novel, Land, is not just a historical fiction piece—it’s a deeply personal excavation of her Irish ancestry, centered on her great-great-grandfather’s work with the British Ordnance Survey in post-Famine Ireland. The novel confronts the violent erasure of Irish lives through cartography, where maps become instruments of colonial control, yet O’Farrell insists her protagonist, Tomas, refuses to erase the trauma of the Great Hunger from the land. This act of resistance—mapping not just geography but memory—is both a literal and metaphysical journey. The story unfolds through a magical transformation of Tomas after drinking from a sacred well, blurring the line between myth and reality. O’Farrell reveals how Irish folklore, with its living land and talking fish, shaped her storytelling DNA, and how her own childhood encephalitis and stammer became tools of linguistic precision and emotional depth. Despite her British accent and long absence from Ireland, she wrestles with identity, asking: who gets to tell the story of a people when you’re neither fully inside nor outside their history? Her answer: the story demands to be told, even if it comes from a place of dislocation. O’Farrell’s work is defined by a radical empathy—especially toward the silenced. In Hamnet, she resurrects a dead boy from footnote status; in Land, she gives voice to the erased. She refuses to let history be sanitized, whether through colonial maps or scholarly indifference.