In Conversation With... Maggie O'Farrell

About

Public On Sale: May 8

Maggie O’Farrell, the bestselling author and Academy Award–nominated co-writer of the TIFF People’s Choice Award–winning film Hamnet, joins us in person for the exclusive Canadian launch of her latest work of fiction, Land: A Novel, one of 2026’s most anticipated books. O’Farrell will discuss Land, as well as her creative process and her collaboration with Chloé Zhao on adapting Hamnet for the big screen, in an in-depth conversation with bestselling author and journalist Claire Cameron.

A soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after The Great Hunger, Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization, and rebellion. Maggie O’Farrell was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death.

Following the in-cinema event, Maggie O’Farrell will be stamping copies of Land with a custom stamp in lieu of signing books due to an injury. She looks forward to meeting guests in the post-event “stamping” line.

Presented in partnership with Penguin Random House Canada and TIFF.

Named a Most Anticipated Read of 2026 by The New Yorker • The New York Times • GQ • The Guardian • BBC • Libby • The Sydney Morning Herald • Featured in BBC's Spring Preview • Oprah Daily • Goodreads • Harpers Bazaar • Los Angeles Times The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after The Great Hunger. On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by The Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one.