In her stunning new novel, The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O’Farrell breathes life into Lucrezia de’ Medici, Duchess of Ferrara, immortalised in Robert Browning’s celebrated poem ‘My Last Duchess’. Taking the painting in Browning’s poem as her focal point, Maggie conjures a spirited, intelligent, creative young woman, provides her with a voice previously stolen by men, and imagines how she might have met her fate. Maggie is the much-loved author of nine novels, including Hamnet, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, Waterstones Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and The Hand That First Held Mine, winner of the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She is also the author of the best-selling memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. Hosted by Kamila Shamsie, MLF Patron and author of Home Fire.
Copies of The Marriage Portrait will be available to collect on the evening of the event.
