Maggie O'Farrell, FRSL (born 27 May 1972), is a distinguished novelist from Northern Ireland. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, After You'd Gone, was awarded the Betty Trask Award. Later, her novel, The Hand That First Held Mine, received the 2010 Costa Novel Award. O'Farrell has been twice shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. She was named among Waterstones' 25 Authors for the Future. Her memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, topped the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020 and the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards. Most recently, her novel The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.