Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

From Academy Award® winning writer/director Chloé Zhao, Hamnet tells the powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet. Hailed as one of the best films of 2025, Hamnet, was co-written by Maggie O’Farrell and Zhao and stars Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter) and Paul Mescal (Aftersun).

The film has recently been nominated for six Golden Globe Awards, eleven Critics Choice Awards, and was shortlisted for Best Cinematography, Best Casting, and Best Original Score for the 2026 Academy Awards®.

Join Rizzoli for a conversation to celebrate the recent release of the film Hamnet, with the novel’s author and film’s co-writer Maggie O’Farrell. The discussion will be followed by a signing.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 1:30 pm.

The bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait delivers a deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, and the years leading up to the production of his great play.
England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on.
A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is just taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.

Maggie O’Farrell is one of the most loved writers in the English language. Her debut, After You’d Gone, marked the start of a career which has established Maggie as one of the great storytellers of our times.

From that point onwards, Maggie has enjoyed critical acclaim and received numerous literary awards. The Hand that First Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award. Hamnet, which imagined the untold story of Shakespeare’s son, won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was Waterstones’ Book of the Year, and was also a no. 1 bestseller. Her most recent novel, The Marriage Portrait, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize.

Maggie co-wrote, with Academy Award-Winner Chloé Zhao (Nomadland), the screenplay for the recent award-winning Hamnet. The film is directed by Chloé Zhao and stars Academy Award-Nominees Paul Mescal (Aftersun) and Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter). Hamnet has previously been adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Maggie is also the author of three books for children, Where Snow Angels Go, The Boy Who Lost His Sparkand, and When the Stutter Came to Stay.

She was born in Coleraine in Northern Ireland and grew up in Wales and Scotland. Currently, she lives in Edinburgh.

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