Maggie O’Farrell has touched on the ‘extraordinary’ success she’s experienced from working on the Hamnet screenplay.

The author likened her time working on the film to winning the lottery, and, despite her immense talent, something that ‘will probably never happen again’.

She was also full of praise for Jessie Buckley, who scooped the Oscar for Best Actress for her role.

‘I learned so much about the language of cinema and storytelling from the screen while working on the screenplay with Chloé Zhao,’ she said.

‘Filming was such a fascinating experience, because novelists are lone wolves, so being on set with 200 people was extraordinary, and then the awards season was just mad. It was such a weird, surreal thing to happen.’

‘What happened with Hamnet was like winning the lottery, and then you go back and do more work, but it was an extraordinary thing that happened and will probably never happen again.’

‘And that’s fine with me, for it to happen once was amazing,’ she told the Irish Independent.

Maggie went on to praise Jessie as ‘a monumentally talented and incredibly nice’ person and was thrilled to see her win the Oscar.

She also touched on how the best advice she’s received as an author is to ‘keep going’.

‘There’s a great kind of consolation in word count, and you can always make bad writing into good writing, but a blank page is only ever a blank page.’