In 1990, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2006 was granted a damehood by Queen Elizabeth II. She garnered a slew of literary awards, including the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2012 Costa Book of the Year, the 2013 David Cohen Prize, and the 2016 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.
Over her career, Hilary Mantel published 17 acclaimed books. She also authored a single memoir: Giving Up the Ghost, a 2003 book which chronicled her lifelong struggles with chronic pain and illness. She released two short story collections ( Learning to Talk and The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher) and published her articles and essays in various publications. While Mantel was best known for her deft and detailed historical novels like these, she was also known for her short stories and nonfiction.
Mantel returned to the life of Cromwell in 2020, with her publication of the trilogy’s third novel: The Mirror and the Light, which was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. They were later adapted into plays by the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as a BBC mini-series. In these novels, Mantel told the story of Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell and his role in the events of Henry VIII’s court. The Wolf Hall books pushed Mantel more into the public eye, hitting bestseller lists worldwide and being translated into in 41 languages. With her 2012 win, she became the fourth author to receive the award twice - and the first author to win with a sequel. She won the prize herself two decades later: in 2009 for Wolf Hall and again in 2012 for its sequel Bring Up the Bodies. Following the 1989 release of her historical novel Fludd, she served as a judge for the 1990 Booker Prize. She and her husband spent five years in Botswana, divorced and subsequently remarried, and in 1985, Mantel published her first novel, Every Day is Mother’s Day - and the very next year, she released its sequel Vacant Possession.Īs she began working as a film critic and reviewer, she quickly garnered acclaim as an author.
It would be another 11 years until she was published. It was in 1974, the year after her wedding to geologist Gerald McEwen, that she began writing her first novel. Mantel studied law and legal theory, first at the London School of Economics and later at the University of Sheffield. While she would eventually become an award-winning author, English was not her original area of study. Mantel was born in Derbyshire in July 1952.
With her impeccable novels, short stories, and essays, she captured the hearts of readers around the world. Hilary Mantel, the two-time Booker Prize winning author of the Wolf Hall trilogy, passed away last week.
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