Best Contemporary Women's Fiction

Maggie O'Farrell FRSL is an Irish-British novelist. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has twice been shortlisted since for the Costa Novel Award for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. Her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards. O'Farrell co-adapted the book for the screen with Chloé Zhao in 2025, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for her work on the film.