Hilary Mantel, award-winning 'Wolf Hall' author, dies at 70
LONDON â Hilary Mantel, the Booker Prize-winning author who turned Tudor power politics into page-turning fiction in the acclaimed âWolf Hallâ trilogy of historical novels, has died. She was 70.
Mantel died âsuddenly yet peacefullyâ surrounded by close family and friends, publisher HarperCollins said Friday.
Mantel is credited with reenergizing historical fiction with âWolf Hallâ and two sequels about the 16th-century English powerbroker Thomas Cromwell, right-hand man to King Henry VIII.
The publisher said Mantel was âone of the greatest English novelists of this century.â
âHer beloved works are considered modern classics. She will be greatly missed,â it said in a statement.
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Mantel won the Booker Prize twice, for âWolf Hallâ in 2009 and its sequel âBring Up the Bodiesâ in 2012. Both were adapted for the stage and television.
The final installment, âThe Mirror and the Light,â was published in 2020.
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Nicholas Pearson, Mantelâs longtime editor, said her death was âdevastating.â
âOnly last month I sat with her on a sunny afternoon in Devon, while she talked excitedly about the new novel she had embarked on,â he said. âThat we wonât have the pleasure of any more of her words is unbearable. What we do have is a body of work that will be read for generations.â
Before âWolf Hall,â Mantel was the critically acclaimed but modestly selling author of novels on subjects ranging from the French Revolution (âA Place of Greater Safetyâ) to the life of a psychic medium (âBeyond Blackâ).
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She also wrote a memoir, âGiving Up the Ghost,â that chronicled years of ill-health, including undiagnosed endometriosis that left her infertile.
She once said the years of illness wrecked her dream of becoming a lawyer but made her a writer.
Mantelâs book about Cromwell turned her into a literary superstar. She turned the shadowy Tudor political fixer into a compelling, complex literary hero, by turns thoughtful and thuggish.
A self-made man who rose from poverty to power, Cromwell was an architect of the Reformation who helped King Henry VIII realize his desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn â and later, to be rid of Boleyn so he could marry Jane Seymour, the third of what would be Henryâs six wives.
The Vaticanâs refusal to annul Henryâs first marriage led the monarch to reject the authority of the pope and install himself as head of the Church of England.
The dramatic period saw England transformed from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant nation, from medieval kingdom to emerging modern state, and it has inspired countless books, films and television series, from âA Man for All Seasonsâ to âThe Tudors.â
But Mantel managed to make the well-known story exciting and suspenseful.
âIâm very keen on the idea that a historical novel should be written pointing forward,â she told The Associated Press in 2009. âRemember that the people you are following didnât know the end of their own story. So they were going forward day by day, pushed and jostled by circumstances, doing the best they could, but walking in the dark, essentially.â
Queen Elizabeth II made Mantel a dame, the female equivalent of a knight, in 2014.
Mantel is survived by her husband, Gerald McEwen.