Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 historical fiction novel Hamnet brought a new version of Shakespeare's story into the world. Centered on the lives of the playwright's family, the book earned O'Farrell the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women's Prize for Fiction. This year, it also became a film starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, with O'Farrell and director Chloé Zhao cowriting the screenplay.
Penning the novel, however, was a process in itself, O'Farrell tells PEOPLE—particularly because of her own three children, whom she shares with husband William Sutcliffe.
"I think if I hadn't had children, [Hamnet] probably would've been quite a different book," O'Farrell explains. "It's hard to take my children out of the picture."
Hamnet reimagines the life of Hamnet Shakespeare, the playwright's only son, who died at age 11 in 1596. Though his official cause of death remains unknown, Hamnet dies of the bubonic plague in the novel. It was a plot point, though, that made O'Farrell hesitant to begin the novel at all.
"One of the reasons I kept putting off writing the book was because I had a weird superstition about not writing it before my son was past the age of 11," she says. "It was ridiculous, because obviously there's not a huge risk of him contracting the Black Death, but you never know. You can't be too careful."
"I knew to write the book, I was going to have to put myself into the skin of a woman who sits beside her son's bedside and, unfortunately, is forced to watch him die," she continues. "I just couldn't do it before my son was safely past that age. I did wait ... he was about 13 or 14 when I actually finally started it."
O'Farrell also originally wasn't going to cowrite the film's screenplay. The novelist was convinced by Zhao's vision for the project, though, and the fact that the screenwriter didn't come from "a background that was necessarily steeped in Shakespeare."
Far from being a drawback, "I felt that that was a real strength ... there've been other films about [Shakespeare's life], and I wanted this one to be different," O'Farrell says.
"She's very good at the macro level of detail, and I'm such a Shakespeare nerd," she explains."If we were writing a new scene together, I could instantly translate it into dialogue that sounded like 16th century England."
Reflecting on the story, O'Farrell says "there is quite a lot of my son in Hamnet." The film, which is getting Oscar buzz, has also impacted her own kids.
"They've kind of roughly seen what's happened, but I think they were quite shocked," she says. "I mean, it is shocking to watch a child die and know that that disease is perfectly treatable in this day and age with antibiotics, but they didn't have that then. But they loved coming on set."