With the 2026 Oscars, Hamnet returned to the spotlight when Jessie Buckley won Best Actress for her performance as Agnes Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel. The film was part of the wider Academy Awards conversation too, earning eight nominations in total, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

For many people, that Oscar moment may be the first time they have really registered the title. But Hamnet was not born as prestige awards material. Published in 2020, O’Farrell’s novel became a major literary event in its own right, reimagining the death of Shakespeare’s son as a story about grief, family, and the strange afterlife of loss. It went on to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, confirming its place as one of the most celebrated historical novels of recent years.

Maggie O’Farrell never approached the novel as a Shakespeare prestige project. The project was a way of looking directly at something history barely paused to notice. Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died in 1596 at the age of eleven, and in most biographies he remains little more than a footnote beneath his father’s fame.

That absence became O’Farrell’s subject. Rather than treating Hamnet as a historical curiosity, she built a novel around the violence of being reduced to a line in history books. The novel restores the intimacy of a life history almost erased.

The novel also draws power from something deeply personal. O’Farrell has spoken about the fear behind the book, her experience as a mother, and the unbearable thought of losing a child. This is why Hamnet never treats grief as a noble literary theme. It feels lived. The sorrow in the book does not come from reverence for Shakespeare, who’s not the central figure here. It comes from a writer who understood how closely love can live beside dread.

That is why the novel clicks. O’Farrell writes through rooms, herbs, hands, weather, fever, fabric, chores, and breath. Tudor life is the very substance of the book, the texture of a time in which losing a child was sadly more common.

Her best, and quite bold decision may be the way she shifts the center of gravity away from Shakespeare and toward Agnes. It’s a book about a part of Shakespeare’s life, but not about Shakespeare. In Hamnet, Agnes is the novel’s living force. Shakespeare matters here less as a monument than as a husband and father.

The shifting is even bolder than this. O’Farrell never names William Shakespeare in the novel. The omission is precisely how she strips away the myth in order to bring back the man. It keeps the book from becoming reverential and referential, and let it be the novel it’s destined to be. It lets Hamnet stay close to bodies. To parents. And to death.

The book is an affirming refusal. O’Farrell takes a child history almost forgot and refuses to leave him as tragic trivia. She gives him atmosphere, and the dignity of detail, which history denied him for centuries. She turns what was destined to remain a historical footnote into the center of a fully inhabited world.

That is why the Oscars matter, and is the perfect occasion to get back to this story. Jessie Buckley and Maggie O’Farrell were both awarded for bringing back Hamnet. It all lies in their ability to turn fear into art, and to build something rich, tender, and unforgettable from the faintest trace history left behind.

Whether you decide to pick the novel or watch the movie, you’re in for a great and moving time.