Maggie O'Farrell

I Am, I Am, I Am is seventeen chapters, each about a separate occasion on which O'Farrell nearly died: encephalitis at eight that cost her a year in hospital, a machete held against her throat on a footpath, a birth that went wrong, an amoebic infection abroad. Hamnet, about the death of Shakespeare's son and about his wife Agnes, took the Women's Prize. She was born in Northern Ireland and raised in Wales and Scotland, and the physical exactness in her prose comes straight out of the childhood illness. The Marriage Portrait belongs to Lucrezia de' Medici.