‘The King’s Speech was like a horror movie for me. I cried for most of it’ – NI novelist on her struggles with stammering

Maggie O’Farrell used to try and hide her stammer as a child, but the experience was a good training ground for writing. She tells Tanya Sweeney how it inspired her new children’s book, and her excitement about Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley starring in the movie adaptation of Hamnet Maggie O’Farrell has written a new children’s book about stammering When Hamnet went from a novel to the subject of a major movie, author Maggie O’Farrell admits that the experience of visiting the book adaptation’s film set was “very weird and very surreal”. The 2020 novel, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, among other accolades, is a fictional account of the grief of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes after the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet.

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