Short answers, pulled from the story.
Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize twice: in 2009 for Wolf Hall and in 2012 for Bring Up the Bodies. She was the first British writer, the first woman, and the first author ever to win the prize for a sequel.
The Thomas Cromwell trilogy consists of Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012), and The Mirror and the Light (2020). The three novels together sold more than five million copies. The first two were adapted by the Royal Shakespeare Company for the stage and by the BBC as a mini-series.
Hilary Mantel was born on the 6th of July 1952 in Glossop, Derbyshire, and was raised as a Roman Catholic in the mill village of Hadfield. When she was eleven, her mother left her father and moved the family to Romiley in Cheshire; Mantel never saw her father again. She later took the surname of her mother's partner, Jack Mantel.
Mantel suffered from a severe form of endometriosis, which was initially misdiagnosed as a psychiatric illness. She was hospitalised and given antipsychotic drugs before diagnosing herself using a medical textbook while living in Botswana. Treatment required a surgical menopause at age twenty-seven, leaving her unable to have children; she later became patron of the Endometriosis SHE Trust.
In a 2013 speech at the British Museum, Mantel described Catherine Middleton, then Duchess of Cambridge, as a personality-free "shop window mannequin" whose public role was to deliver an heir. She expanded the argument in a London Review of Books essay titled "Royal Bodies." Both Prime Minister David Cameron and Opposition Leader Ed Miliband publicly criticised her remarks.
Hilary Mantel died on the 22nd of September 2022, aged 70, at a hospital in Exeter from complications of a stroke. At the time of her death she was working on a new novel described as a "mash-up" of Jane Austen novels, as well as a short non-fiction book about the Polish playwright Stanisława Przybyszewska.