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Maggie O’Farrell on reading to ‘fill your soul’ Amy Sutherland © MURDO MACLEODAll Novelist Maggie O'Farrell. In her award-winning, best-selling novel, “Hamnet,” Maggie O’Farrell imagines life in 16th-century England when the Black Plague claims the life of an 11-year-old boy who happens to be the only son of a budding playwright. The Irish-born author grew up in Wales and Scotland, where she now lives in Edinburgh with her family. Her previous book was the memoir, “I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death.” “Hamnet,” her eighth novel, is out in pap...

Annie Freud at her home in Dorset  “This is my cabinet of curiosities!” says Annie Freud, waving toward a great glass-fronted, Victorian-looking thing, its shelves lined with whatnot. The 72-year-old author and artist is cheerfully chain-smoking as she gives me a video-call tour of the room where she writes her poems. It’s a cluttered study in a rural corner of west Dorset – a land of “wild animals and cataclysmic weather,” says Freud – where she lives with her second husband, David. Freud’s playful poems are themselves cabinets of curiosities. All sorts of curios – a radar...