Booker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel dead at 70 CBC News

Hilary Mantel, Booker Prize-winning author of the acclaimed Wolf Hall saga of historical novels, has died. she was 70

Mantel died “suddenly but peacefully” surrounded by close family and friends, editor HarperCollins said Friday.

Mantel is credited with reviving historical novels Wolf Hall and two sequels about the 16th-century English ruler Thomas Cromwell, right-hand man of King Henry VIII.

The publisher said that Mantel was “one of the greatest English novelists of this century”.

“Your beloved works are considered modern classics. She will be greatly missed,” the statement said.

LISTEN l Hilary Mantel talks to CBC’s Writers & Company:

Mantel has twice won the Booker Prize, e.g Wolf Hall in 2009 and its sequel Bring up the bodies in 2012. The last installment, The mirror and the lightreleased in 2020.

The success of Wolf Hall turned Mantel from a critically acclaimed but low-selling novelist into a literary superstar. Before that, she had written works that contained A place of greater securityset during the French Revolution, and Beyond Blackabout the life of a psychic medium.

“I’m always aware of untold stories,” she told CBC Authors & Companies in 2012. “Historical fiction is in many ways a project of restoration, rediscovery, sometimes rehabilitation.”

Mantel transformed Cromwell, a seedy political junkie, into a compelling, complex literary hero. Cromwell was an architect of the Reformation who helped the king realize his desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The Vatican’s refusal to annul Henry’s first marriage prompted the monarch to reject the pope’s authority and install himself as head of the Church of England.

“Wipe the slate clean”

It is a time in history that has inspired many books, films and television series A man for all seasons to The Tudors. But Mantel managed to make the well-known story new and exciting.

“The first thing I did then was go back to the historical record — to try to forget what I had read in biographies — and I started accessing a whole different story,” she said told CBC radio in 2020. “I’ve seen historians pass not just prejudice, but error, from one generation to the next.

“So I felt like wiping the slate clean and trying to see Cromwell like it was the first time.”

The first two novels in the trilogy were adapted for a BBC series that aired in 2015, starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell, Damian Lewis as Henry VIII and Claire Foy as the King’s second wife, Anne Boleyn.

Illness affects marriage, career path

Nicholas Pearson, longtime editor of Mantel, said her death was “devastating”.

“Just last month I sat with her on a sunny afternoon in Devon as she excitedly talked about the new novel she had started,” he said. “It is unbearable that we will no longer enjoy her words. What we have is a work that will be read for generations to come.”

Mantel studied law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University and initially worked as a social worker. She turned to writing fiction while living in Botswana with her geologist husband Gerald McEwen for five years.

The couple divorced, a split cloak attributed to her illness and the infertility caused by the treatment she received for it, but later remarried.

She would later write the memoirs To quit service (2003), who chronicled years of illness, including undiagnosed endometriosis. She once said years of illness shattered her dream of becoming a lawyer but turned her into a writer.

her first novel Every day is Mother’s Daywas released in 1985. She has authored a total of 17 books, including non-fiction.

Politically open

Mantel could be politically outspoken. A 2013 speech in which she described former Kate Middleton, wife of Prince William, as a “mannequin with no personality of her own” drew the ire of the British tabloids.

Mantel said she was not speaking of the Duchess herself but was describing a view of Kate that was constructed by the press and public opinion. The author nevertheless received criticism from the then Prime Minister David Cameron, among others.

Right-wing commentators also criticized a short story with the title The assassination of Margaret Thatcher, who envisioned an attack on the Conservative leader. It was released in 2014, the same year Queen Elizabeth II made Mantle a Dame, the female equivalent of a knight.

A Brexit opponent, she said in 2021 that she hoped to gain Irish citizenship and become “European again”.

Mantel is survived by her husband.