The book became a major success, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. This year, the story reached an even wider audience with a film adaptation starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, directed by Chloé Zhao. O’Farrell also helped write the screenplay.
But the road to writing Hamnet was not an easy one.
Speaking recently, O’Farrell said her experience as a mother played a huge role in shaping the book. She shares three children with her husband, writer William Sutcliffe, and says it was impossible to separate her own life from the story she was telling.
“If I hadn’t had children, Hamnet would probably have been a very different book,” she explained. “It’s hard to take my children out of the picture.”
The novel reimagines the short life of Hamnet Shakespeare, whose real cause of death is unknown. In O’Farrell’s version, the boy dies from the bubonic plague. That choice made the project emotionally overwhelming — so much so that she delayed writing the book for years.
One reason, she said, was a quiet fear linked to her own son’s age.
“I had this superstition about not writing it before my son was past 11,” she said. “It sounds silly — obviously there’s no real risk of the Black Death today — but when you’re a parent, you feel you can’t be too careful.”
O’Farrell knew the story would force her to imagine the worst possible loss.
“To write the book, I had to put myself in the position of a woman sitting beside her son’s bed, watching him die,” she said. “I just couldn’t do that until my son was safely past that age.”
She finally began writing when her son was around 13 or 14.
O’Farrell was also unsure about getting involved in the film version at first. What changed her mind was director Chloé Zhao’s approach — especially the fact that Zhao did not come from a traditional Shakespeare background.
Rather than seeing this as a weakness, O’Farrell saw it as a strength.
“There have been other films about Shakespeare’s life,” she said. “I wanted this one to feel different.”
The two writers worked closely together. Zhao focused on the larger emotional and visual ideas, while O’Farrell helped shape dialogue that felt true to 16th-century England.
“I’m a complete Shakespeare nerd,” O’Farrell admitted. “So if we were creating a new scene, I could quickly translate it into language that sounded right for the time.”
Looking back, O’Farrell says the story is deeply personal. Parts of Hamnet, she believes, reflect her own son.
“There is quite a lot of my son in Hamnet,” she said.
The film, which is already attracting early Oscar buzz, has also had an impact on her children. While they understood the story, seeing it on screen was still powerful.
“They were quite shocked,” she said. “It’s hard to watch a child die — especially knowing that today, that illness would be easily treated with antibiotics. But they loved visiting the set and being part of it.”
For O’Farrell, Hamnet remains a story shaped by love, fear, and the deep bonds between parents and children — both on the page and now on screen.
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