Hilary Mantel

• 1. Introduction

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  Hilary Mantel stood at the podium at the Guildhall in London in 2009 and told the audience she was "happily flying through the air." She had just won the Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, a novel about Thomas Cromwell that bookmakers had backed as the favourite, a distinction no winner had held since 2002. The judges, led by the broadcaster James Naughtie, called it an "extraordinary piece of storytelling." When asked what she planned to do with the fifty-thousand-pound cash prize, she said she would spend it on "sex and drugs and rock and roll."

  She would return to collect that same prize three years later for Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel. No British writer and no woman had ever won the Booker more than once before her. The Thomas Cromwell trilogy she built across more than a decade would go on to sell more than five million copies.

  What is harder to see in that triumphant Guildhall moment is the terrain she had crossed to get there. A childhood fractured by a father who disappeared. A body that turned against her at twenty-seven. Years of living in Botswana and Jeddah before she found her way into print. A first novel she began in 1974 that waited eighteen years for a publisher.

• 2. A Childhood Fractured

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  Hilary Mary Thompson was born on the 6th of July 1952 in Glossop, Derbyshire, the eldest of three children. Her family raised her in the mill village of Hadfield as a Roman Catholic, and she attended St. Charles Roman Catholic Primary School there.

  When she was seven, her mother's lover, a man named Jack Mantel, moved into the family home. He shared a bedroom with her mother while her father slept elsewhere in the house. Four years later, when Mantel was eleven, her mother packed up the household and moved to Romiley in Cheshire, taking the children but leaving the father behind. Mantel never saw him again.

  Jack Mantel, born in 1932, became her unofficial stepfather in Romiley, and she took his surname legally. The name she carried for the rest of her life was not the name she was born with. She attended Harrytown Convent school in Romiley, where the Catholic faith her family had instilled in her began to erode. By twelve, she had stopped believing.

  She later described what Catholicism had installed in her as a kind of internal policeman, one who kept changing the rules, who made nothing ever quite good enough. The intensity of that upbringing, she said, bred a severe habit of self-examination that never left. The Catholic bishop Mark O'Toole, decades later, would acknowledge an "anti-Catholic thread" running through her work, citing Wolf Hall by name. Mantel herself, in a 2013 interview with The Daily Telegraph, said she had come to see priests and nuns as "amongst the worst people I knew."

• 3. Law, Then Literature

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  In 1970, Mantel enrolled at the London School of Economics to study law. She transferred to the University of Sheffield and graduated with a Bachelor of Jurisprudence in 1973. That same year she married Gerald McEwen, a geologist.

  In 1974, she began work on a novel about the French Revolution. No publisher would take it. She set the manuscript aside and it would not appear in print until 1992, when it was finally released as A Place of Greater Safety. The wait did not diminish it: it became The Sunday Express Book of the Year for that year, an award for which her two previous novels had also been shortlisted.

  Before the French Revolution novel could reach its audience, Mantel spent five years working in the social work department of a geriatric hospital and then as a sales assistant at Kendals department store in Manchester. In 1977 she moved with her husband to Botswana, where they lived for five years. After that came four years in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She later described the day she left Jeddah as "the happiest day of her life." She published accounts of that period in The Spectator and the London Review of Books.

  Her first novel, Every Day Is Mother's Day, appeared in 1985. Its sequel, Vacant Possession, followed a year later. After returning to England, she took on the role of film critic at The Spectator, a post she held from 1987 to 1991, and became a reviewer for papers and magazines in both Britain and the United States.

• 4. The Body as Subject

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  During her twenties, Mantel suffered a debilitating and painful illness that doctors initially misread as a psychiatric condition. She was hospitalised and treated with antipsychotic drugs, which reportedly produced psychotic symptoms of their own. The experience left her wary of seeking medical help for years.

  Finally, while living in Botswana and desperate, she consulted a medical textbook herself and concluded she was probably suffering from a severe form of endometriosis. Doctors in London later confirmed the diagnosis. The treatment considered necessary at the time was a surgical menopause, performed when she was twenty-seven. It left her unable to have children.

  She later said the experience forced her to "think through questions of fertility and menopause" in a way that most people never do. She traced her attention to the problematised female body in her fiction directly to those years. She eventually became patron of the Endometriosis SHE Trust. On the subject of chronic pain, she said: "You have to find a way of living with it and living around it." She used autogenic training as one practical tool.

  Her 2005 novel Beyond Black, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and longlisted for the Booker, features a professional medium named Alison Hart whose outwardly cheerful manner conceals what the novel calls grotesque psychic damage. Novelist Pat Barker said publicly that Beyond Black was "the book that should actually have won the Booker."

• 5. The Cromwell Trilogy

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  Wolf Hall, published in 2009, reconstructed the inner life of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son who rose to become Henry VIII's most powerful minister. The novel was backed as the favourite by bookmakers before the prize was announced and accounted for 45% of all sales among the nominated titles. Three of the five Booker judges voted for it.

  Bring Up the Bodies followed in May 2012 and won both the Costa Book of the Year and that year's Man Booker Prize. With that second win, Mantel became the first British writer, the first woman, and the first author ever to win the Booker for a sequel. Only three writers had previously won the prize twice: J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, and J. G. Farrell.

  The Royal Shakespeare Company adapted both novels for the stage. The BBC produced them as a mini-series. In December 2016, Mantel spoke with Kenyon Review editor David H. Lynn about what it was like to live in the world of a single character for more than a decade. She delivered five Reith Lectures on BBC Radio Four in 2017, taking historical fiction as her theme; the producer Jim Frank later named her lectures among the best in the series' long history.

  The Mirror and the Light, the third and final volume, appeared in 2020 and was longlisted for that year's Booker Prize. Together, the three novels sold more than five million copies.

• 6. Controversy and Public Voice

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  In a 2013 speech at the British Museum on media and royal women, Mantel described Catherine Middleton, then the Duchess of Cambridge, as a personality-free "shop window mannequin" whose public role was reduced to delivering an heir. She expanded the argument in a London Review of Books essay titled "Royal Bodies," published on the 21st of February 2013, writing: "It may be that the whole phenomenon of monarchy is irrational, but that doesn't mean that when we look at it we should behave like spectators at Bedlam."

  Both the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, and Prime Minister David Cameron criticised the remarks. Jemima Khan defended Mantel. Zing Tsjeng praised the LRB essay and called its clarity of prose and analysis "just incredible."

  In September 2014, Mantel told The Guardian she had fantasised about the murder of Margaret Thatcher in 1983 and had turned that fantasy into the title story of her short story collection, "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: the 6th of August 1983." Allies of Thatcher called for a police investigation. Mantel responded that calling in the police "immediately exposes them to ridicule." The Guardian called the collection as a whole a "flawed but absorbing selection," while The New York Times noted that its narrators were "much more outwardly meek and inwardly turbulent" than the figures in her historical fiction. In 2026, a stage adaptation of the title story premiered at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre, written by Alexandra Wood and directed by John Young.

• 7. Final Years

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  Hilary Mantel and Gerald McEwen divorced in 1981 and remarried in 1982. McEwen eventually gave up geology to manage his wife's business affairs. They lived in Budleigh Salterton, Devon.

  At the time of her death in September 2022, Mantel was working on a new novel described as a "mash-up" of Jane Austen novels. She died on the 22nd of September 2022, aged 70, at a hospital in Exeter, from complications of a stroke that had occurred three days earlier. She had also been at work on a short non-fiction book, The Woman Who Died of Robespierre, about the Polish playwright Stanisława Przybyszewska.

  She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2006 Birthday Honours and elevated to Dame Commander in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to literature. The London School of Economics, where she had begun her studies in 1970, awarded her an honorary LLD in 2015. The University of Oxford awarded her an honorary DLitt that same year. The David Cohen Prize, widely regarded as a lifetime achievement award for British literature, came to her in 2013.