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Interview

Maggie O’Farrell: ‘I think Shakespeare resurrected his dead son as a 15-year-old in Hamlet. It’s heartbreaking’

The author’s latest novel, ‘Hamnet’, suggests the Bard’s son died of the plague. It was written before the coronavirus outbreak but, she tells Charlotte Cripps, plague is ‘in our cities, in our language and in the songs we sing our children’

Wednesday 01 April 2020 19:29 BST
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O’Farrell never mentions Shakespeare by name in her historical fiction
O’Farrell never mentions Shakespeare by name in her historical fiction

I didn’t see it coming when I wrote it,” says Maggie O’Farrell of coronavirus and the uncanny parallels between the pandemic and her riveting new novel, Hamnet.

It’s set during the bubonic plague outbreak of the 1590s and is a profound study of love, grief and the fragility of life that lands just as the world is on red alert dealing with Covid-19.

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Hamnet is the author’s eighth novel – and her first historical fiction. It puts the spotlight on William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, who died from what some historians believe to have been the plague in 1596, aged 11.

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