S TUTTERING FOUNDATION CELEBRITY CORNER
MA GGIE O'F ARRELL AMERICAN BEST-SELLING AUTHOR
Award-winning novelist Maggie O’Farrell was in the news in late 2024 with the publication of her children’s book When the Stammer Came to Stay, which has received rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. It is the author’s third children’s book.
Her career as a novelist took off when her first work in 2001, After You’d Gone, won the Betty Trask Award. Her novel The Hand That Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award. In addition, she was twice shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award with Heatwave (2014) and This Must Be the Place (2017). Her memoir I am, I am, I am: Seventeen Brushes with Death topped the Sunday Times bestsellers list. O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020, in addition to the fiction prize at the 2020 National Books Critics Circle Awards; Hamnet will be released as a movie in 2025 starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal and directed by Chloe Zhao. Her novel The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
The celebrated author penned an essay about growing up Irish in Great Britain in the November 22, 2024 edition of the Irish Times that carried the
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headline, “Author Maggie O’Farrell: I had a teacher at school who took the register, saw my name and said to me, 'Are your family in the IRA?'. She wrote, “Being Irish in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s wasn’t easy.” In the piece she also addressed how her stammering was anything but easy: “I was about seven when I first became conscious that I was stammering. In my child-brain I thought maybe nobody else noticed. Then of course the kids at school started imitating me, and I thought, 'No it’s not just inside my head.' It was painful starting in a new school as a teenager in Scotland. English was one of my favourite subjects and I couldn’t get my words out to read in class. Pronouncing the letter M was hard, which is tricky when your name is Maggie, and you want to read Macbeth out loud in class. I never got any speech therapy as a child, you just got on with it. Much later, I had to talk about one of my books on live radio, my worst nightmare, and I shut down in the middle of talking to Jenni Murray on BBC Radio 4's Woman’s Hour. I did manage to get past it, but I realized I couldn’t go on like that anymore so I got some therapy. The therapist asked me to keep a stammering diary."
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