Hilary Mantel, the award-winning author of the “Wolf Hall” Tudor trilogy, died peacefully on Thursday at the age of 70, according to her publisher.
Both “Wolf Hall,” published in 2009, and its sequel “Bring Up the Bodies,” published three years later, received the Booker Prize, a first for two books in the same trilogy and making Mantel the first woman to win the award twice. “The Mirror & the Light,” the series’ conclusion, was released in March 2020 and was long-listed for the Booker Prize. It was awarded the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2021, which she previously received for “Wolf Hall.”
“It is with great sadness that HarperCollins reports that popular author Dame Hilary Mantel DBE died peacefully, surrounded by close family and friends, yesterday,” a statement on her publisher 4th Estate Books’ website said.
“Hilary Mantel will be recognized as a truly unique writer. She leaves behind a great body of work that continues to inspire readers all around the world.” The BBC serialized and staged the “Wolf Hall” trilogy, which followed the adventures of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son who grew to become King Henry VIII’s most powerful adviser only to fall from grace and meet a horrible death.
It has been translated into 41 languages and has sold over 5 million copies globally. Mantel described the books in a 2020 interview with the Guardian as “about all the big vital things that matter, about sex and power and high politics, statecraft and forgeries and delusion and lies.”
Other best-selling authors expressed their sorrow on Twitter, with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling writing, “We’ve lost a genius.” Bernardine Evaristo, a fellow Booker Prize winner, stated: “I was devastated to learn of Hilary Mantel’s death. We were quite fortunate to have such a huge talent in our midst.”
HISTORICAL INSIGHT
Mantel, who was born on July 6, 1952, in Derbyshire, studied law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University before beginning her career as a social worker. While living in Botswana for five years, she began writing fiction.
Mantel also lived in Saudi Arabia before returning to the United Kingdom in the mid-1980s. “Every Day is Mother’s Day,” her first novel, was released in 1985. She wrote 17 books in all, including nonfiction, and was awarded a damehood in 2014 for services to literature.
“It is impossible to exaggerate the magnitude of Hilary Mantel’s literary legacy. Her magnificent Wolf Hall trilogy was the pinnacle of an already impressive collection of work “Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced the news on Twitter.
Many people, including then-Prime Minister David Cameron, chastised Mantel in 2013 for referring to Prince William’s pregnant wife Kate as “a jointed doll on which certain garments are hung.”
“She was a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, wholly defined by what she wore,” Mantel said in a talk at London’s British Museum. Mantel suffered from chronic health issues for much of her life, describing the crippling pain and weariness caused by severe endometriosis, a disorder in which tissue comparable to the womb lining grows in other locations.
She claimed that her illness, as well as infertility induced by the medication she got, had contributed to a temporary divorce from her geologist husband Gerald McEwen, whom she married when she was 20. The couple split but quickly remarried. Her agent, Bill Hamilton of AM HEATH, said she had handled her health issues “courageously” and that it had been a pleasure to work with her.
“Her caustic humor, stylistic audacity, creative ambition, and extraordinary historical knowledge distinguish her as one of our time’s best novels,” he remarked. “There was always a faint atmosphere of otherworldliness about her, since she saw and felt things that we regular mortals didn’t, yet when she saw the necessity for conflict, she would courageously go into combat.”
