Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Life is too short to waste time on books you don’t like'
This article is more than 6 years old
The award-winning author on being inspired by Angela Carter and struggling with Henry James
Maggie O’Farrell Friday 2 April 2020
The book I am currently reading Danielle Evans’s Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. I picked it not knowing anything about her – that fabulous title was enough – and I was swept away by the energy and immediacy of the stories. She has all the verve and daring of the best of Junot Díaz, with the insight of Edith Pearlman. I’m slowing down because I don’t want the book to end.
Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Fiction comes from what you don’t know’
From a young age, the authorwas told that one of her ancestors had drawn some of the first maps of Ireland. Then she found a photograph, and embarked on a journey to discover his story
Maggie O’Farrell
Sun 31 May 2026
very family has its myths. In mine, we were told that one of our antecedents had worked on the first maps of Ireland. As a child, I used to picture a solitary person in unspecified period dress – a tailcoat, perhaps some kind of cravat – striding pensively about fields and mountains, pen in hand. On summer holidays, I would stare out of the window of our red car as Donegal or Galway rolled by and wonder that such a task could be achieved. How did one man set about drawing a map of a whole country, of these towns and strands and trees and rivers?
All myths comprise a great deal of fanciful embroidery through which runs the distinct thread of truth: time and retelling will always refract reality. This mapper preyed on my mind. I thought about him, always, when I travelled around Ireland. I thought about him in my final year of school, when my geography exam required me to analyse a square of an unknown map. I wanted, as I often do, to know more, about his life, his work, who he had been and how he had mapped.
It took me a very long time to find him. What happened was this: a relative died and my parents were sent some items pertaining to the family. Among these was a hand-drawn map of an imaginary place, no larger than a hardback book, beautifully rendered in coloured inks. Also, an ancient photograph of a man seated in a doorway with a child on his knee. No tailcoats or cravats were present: this man wore a worn jacket and a low-brimmed hat, the dwelling behind him was a stone cottage with a latched half-door. The child gazed at the photographer with alert, inquisitive eyes.
Here they were, the mapper and his son, my great-great-grandfather with my great-grandfather on his knee. Returning to examine the map with a magnifying glass, I was able to see, in the highest left-hand corner, inside a tiny medallion, in what must have been painted with a minuscule brush, an intriguing tableau. A red-jacketed soldier was leaning to look into a theodolite mounted on a tripod; behind him, holding a measuring chain, stood a man instantly recognisable as the mapper from the photograph.
There was the same faded jacket, the turned-up hat, the beard, the rigidity of stance. Here he had been, hidden to the naked eye, for more than 150 years. This near-invisible yet politically freighted tableau transfixed me: the confident, possessive stance of the British soldier; the proximity and almost palpable anxiety of my great-great-grandfather behind him. So I went searching for whatever else I could find.
Locating him in written records proved difficult due to the ruling that Irish personnel for the Ordnance Survey were not permitted at this time to sign their own work: all survey notes and draft maps had to be certified and signed by a British army officer. I leafed through the immense Ordnance Survey archives in Dublin and found such fascinating documents as guidelines for typography and a letter from a landlady in Cavan who complained that the army sappers had damaged a bed. A command that all “labourers” be known only by the anglicised translation of their names. After a memorandum that “all Labourers be allowed one Week’s leave of absence”, was a list of signatures, including that of my great-great-grandfather. His name leapt off the page: a slanting script, not dissimilar to my own, written with a sure and deft hand.
It’s hard to describe the moment when I found this. I would have clapped my hands and cheered were it not for the hushed environs of the archives. Here he was and here it was: incontrovertable proof, in black and white, of the truth of what we were told as children. I wanted to turn to my fellow archive-perusers and say, you’ll never guess, just look at this.
The illustration from the map.
When I read it for the second time, however, it was impossible not to notice that the letter was dated June 1853. Even someone with only the scantest grasp of history will know that Ireland suffered a cataclysmic great famine in the middle of the 19th century. Between 1846 and 1852, more than a million people died of starvation or famine-related disease; a further million were forced to emigrate, many of whom expired at sea; it’s worth noting that these numbers are considered by some historians as conservative estimates.
This memorandum showed that my great-great-grandfather was accompanying Ordnance Survey mapping divisions, acting as labourer and translator, making revisions in the aftermath of this disaster. He would have been traversing a country ravaged and laid waste: almost 30% of the population lost, whole villages wiped out, mass graves at the sides of roads, estates and fields reconfigured, unprecedented socio-political upheaval. It would have been his job to ensure that these grim changes were marked on the new post-famine versions of Ireland’s maps. What can that possibly have been like? How could a person who had lived through those times take on that task?
I have always taken issue with the edict, often aired in creative writing classes, that you should write what you know. Land is about a man, Tomás, and his family, striving to emerge from the long shadow of the great famine; it also tells the whole story of Ireland via one narrow scrap of land and all the people who have lived upon it.
For me, fiction comes from what you don’t know, from – in this case – the many things about the history of Ireland, particularly in the 19th century, that confounded me, that filled me with questions. Chief among these questions was how a disaster of such magnitude was permitted to happen so close to the centre of one of the richest empires in the world. Land, then, came from a sense of perplexity and outrage, spurred on by the handful of details I knew about my great-great-grandfather – and a hand-drawn map, a photograph, and a myth that turned out to contain more truth than we ever could have imagined.
A soldier stands guard in a street in Medellín. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Colombia prepares to go to polls in election shadowed by resurgence of political violence
Sunday’s presidential vote is contest between left and right – and between contradictory proposals for dealing with the decades-long armed conflict
Tiago Rogero
Saturday 30 May 2026
Mateo Pérez Rueda was one internship away from completing a degree in political science. The 24-year-old also worked as a bicycle delivery rider and sold fruit salads and juice to finance his passion: the Colombian independent digital magazine El Confidente.
I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. Illustration: Walker Publishers / Jon Klassen
‘I am very serious about being silly’: children’s illustrators on the art of storytelling
From The Twits to The Gruffalo and an angry bear in search of his hat… Quentin Blake, Cressida Cowell, Axel Sheffler, Lauren Child and more reveal how they bring children’s books to life
Spread across a sprawling 17th-century industrial complex in London’s Clerkenwell, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, which opens next month, is being billed as the largest institution of its kind anywhere in the world: a permanent national home for an art form that shapes everything from children’s books and political cartoons to animation, fashion, advertising and digital culture. Part museum, part gallery and part creative laboratory, the centre represents an extraordinary attempt to drag illustration out of the margins and finally place it at the heart of British cultural life.
Leïla Slimani: ‘Salman Rushdie’s books made me feel I could become a writer’
This article is more than 2 years old
The Lullaby author on identifying with Jo in Little Women, being terrified of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and why we’re still in debt to Steinbeck
Leïla Slimani Friday 10 May 2024 10.00 BST
My earliest reading memory Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey Through Sweden by Selma Lagerlöf. My grandmother, who grew up in Germany, read it to me when I was a child and then, when I was eight, she gave me a copy that I still have. I, too, dreamed of travelling and escaping, just like that little boy.
My favourite book growing up Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Because we were three girls, our mother was a doctor and my sisters and I liked to identify with the characters in the book. Of course, I was Jo!
The book that changed me as a teenager The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. It was an erotic and spiritual shock. I didn’t understand everything when I read it – I must have been 16 – but it really moved me physically, as if the words were entering me.
The writer who changed my mind Simone de Beauvoir, whose The Second Sex I borrowed from the library when I was 16. Suddenly, I realised that there was no point in responding to injustice with anger or violence. The best way to fight, for a woman, was knowledge.
The book that made me want to be a writer All the books by Marguerite Duras, and Écrire in particular, because her passion for literature, for freedom, for the absolute, matched everything I was looking for in life.
The book or author I came back to John Steinbeck. I had read him at school and didn’t understand him at all. I reread The Grapes of Wrath a few years ago and it was a shock. It’s a real masterpiece, with a staggeringly modern take on capitalism, social violence and migration.
The book I reread The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I read it every year and I always find something different. It’s an unclassifiable book: part novel, part treatise on philosophy and music, part essay. I don’t think a lifetime will be enough to unravel its mystery.
The book I could never read again The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. I don’t know why, but this book terrified me and I’ve never been able to open it again.
The book I discovered later in life Le Cahier Interdit (The Forbidden Notebook) by Alba de Céspedes. I read it recently and it moved me enormously. It’s the story of an Italian housewife who buys herself a notebook in which she writes down her thoughts and is terrified at the thought of it being found. From the moment she starts writing, she yearns more and more for freedom.
The book I am currently reading Knife by Salman Rushdie. I’ve admired him ever since I was a child, and his books have carried me along, giving me the feeling that maybe one day I too could become a writer.
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