NI author ‘changed by near-death experience’

AUTHOR Maggie O’farrell said a near-death experience when she was a child had a profound effect on her, making her feel like she “cheated the universe” and was “living on borrowed time”.

The writer from Coleraine, Northern Ireland, whose 2020 novel Hamnet, about the short life of Shakespeare’s son, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was named Waterstones Book of the Year, almost died from encephalitis when she was eight.

She missed a year of school and only returned to health when she was almost 11.

Speaking to Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, she said: “Anyone who has been through a severe illness will know you were, in a sense, one person before it, and come out the other side as somebody else.

“You are reconfigured and it’s like passing through a fire. You are essentially the same person but you have been taken apart and put back together again.”

O’farrell recalled lying in bed in hospital hearing staff talk about the fact she was going to die and thinking they were talking about another little girl.

She added: “Any brush with mortality does change you I think.

“You come back from the brink a different person every time. You are always going to be a wiser and sadder person when you come back from that brink because you have stared into the abyss and you can’t ever forget that.

“You might pretend you have forgotten that or you might shake it and think I’m fine and carry on, but it’s always there, it’s still lodged inside you.”