Hamnet author Maggie O’Farrell has spoken about her reasons for turning down an OBE.
The author of several acclaimed bestsellers, including her 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, has found herself in the spotlight more than ever after her 2020 novel, about the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal this year.
In a new interview with The Irish Times, O’Farrell spoke about her Irish heritage and why of all the prizes she has received, she felt compelled to reject the OBE.
O’Farrell, 54, was born in Ireland in 1982 and moved with her family aged two to Wales before settling in Scotland. She currently lives in Edinburgh.
Speaking about her forthcoming novel Land, which is set in the west of Ireland in 1865, O’Farrell said one of the “seeds” of the book “was that I was offered an OBE and I turned it down”.
“I was thinking about why it was I didn’t want it, and the first thing was that I didn’t want ‘British Empire’ as part of my name,” she explained.
Going further into specifics, O’Farrell continued: “The second was I said to myself, ‘Well, if [Victorian colonial administrator] Charles Trevelyan has it, I don’t want it.’
“He was given a knighthood after he called the Famine an act of God, and he still has it. They haven’t revoked it, and they should. I thought I can’t be part of an honours system that honours him.”
O’Farrell went on to say that it’s “high time, actually, for them to rethink” the name of the honour, given the colonial history of the British Empire.
“Obviously people accept it and I don’t feel hostile towards them, but I just couldn’t do it for those two reasons,” she concluded.
The author is far from the only one to turn down a British honour. Writers Roald Dahl, JG Billard, chef Nigella Lawson, footballer Howard Gayle, and poet Benjamin Zephaniah are among those to have also rejected the offer for various reasons.
In 2020, Welsh actor Michael Sheen revealed he had returned his award after realising his anti-imperialist views were at odds with holding the title.
Published on 2 June, O’Farrell’s next book Land is a multigenerational family epic that follows a son and his father working for the Great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. It is her 10th novel, having previously written nine others including Hamnet as well as children’s books and her memoir.