Maggie O'Farrell Wins 2010 Costa Novel Award

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Irish author Maggie O'Farrell has won the 2010 Costa Novel Award for her book The Hand that First Held Mine.

The novel, a story of love and motherhood in the 1950s and 1960s, is O'Farrell's fifth. Previously published works include After You'd Gone, winner of a Betty Trask Award, My Lover's Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won the 2005 Somerset Maugham Award, and The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox.

Maggie O'Farrell was born in Colraine, Northern Ireland, in 1972, and grew up in Wales and Scotland. She now lives in Edinburgh with her family.

Translations of her works have been published in Albanian, Danish, French and Latvian with support from Ireland Literature Exchange.