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Dame Hilary Mary Mantel ( ; born Thompson; 6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022) was a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories. Her first published novel, Every Day Is Mother's Day, was released in 1985. She went on to write 12 novels, two collections of short stories, a memoir, and numerous articles and opinion pieces.
Mantel won the Booker Prize twice: the first was for her 2009 novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, and the second was for its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies. The third installment of the Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was longlisted for the same prize. The trilogy has gone on to sell more than 5 million copies.
Her parents, Margaret (née Foster) and Henry Thompson (a clerk), were both Catholics of Irish descent, born in England. When Mantel was seven, her mother's lover, Jack Mantel, moved in with the family. He shared a bedroom with her mother, while her father moved to another room. Four years later, when she was eleven, the family, except for her father, moved to Romiley, Cheshire, to escape the local gossip. She never saw her father again.Obituary in The Times (London); reprinted in The Dominion Post (New Zealand), 27 September 2022, page 24
When the family relocated, Jack Mantel (1932–1995) became her unofficial stepfather, and she legally took his surname. She attended Harrytown Convent school in Romiley, Cheshire.
In 1970, she began studies at the London School of Economics to read law. She transferred to the University of Sheffield and graduated as a Bachelor of JurisprudenceNote: Sheffield University Law School established the 2-year "B.Jur" degree in 1970. It was designed to allow students who had successfully completed their first year in other faculties to change direction and study law. The B.Jur syllabus was a "stripped-down" curriculum where the core subjects were taught, enabling graduates to proceed to further professional examinations as though they had completed a 3-year LLB degree course. Mantel was in only the second-ever cohort of B.Jur students. in 1973. After university, Mantel worked in the social work department of a geriatric hospital and then as a sales assistant at Kendals department store in Manchester.
In 1973, she married Gerald McEwen, a geologist. In 1974, she began writing a novel about the French Revolution, but was unable to find a publisher (it was eventually released as A Place of Greater Safety in 1992). In 1977 Mantel moved with her husband to Botswana, where they lived for the next five years. Later, they spent four years in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She later said that leaving Jeddah felt like "the happiest day of her life". She published memoirs of this period in The Spectator, and the London Review of Books.
Her third novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), drew on her life in Saudi Arabia. It features a threatening clash of values between the neighbours in a city apartment block to explore the tensions between Islamic culture and the liberal West. Her Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize-winning novel Fludd (1989) is set in 1956 in a fictitious northern village called Fetherhoughton, centering on a Roman Catholic church and a convent. A mysterious stranger brings about transformations in the lives of those around him.
Mantel was a Booker Prize judge in 1990, when A.S. Byatt's novel Possession was awarded the prize.
A Place of Greater Safety (1992) became The Sunday Express Book of the Year, an award for which her two previous books had been shortlisted. This large-scale historical novel, informed by scholarly knowledge, traces the career of three French revolutionaries, Georges Danton, Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, from childhood to their early deaths during the Reign of Terror of 1794.
A Change of Climate (1994), partly set in rural Norfolk, explores the lives of Ralph and Anna Eldred, as they raise their four children and devote their lives to charity. It includes chapters about their early married life as missionaries in South Africa, when they were imprisoned and deported to Bechuanaland, and the tragedy that occurred there.
An Experiment in Love (1996), which won the Hawthornden Prize, takes place over two university terms in 1970. It follows the progress of three girls – two friends and one enemy – as they leave home and attend university in London. Margaret Thatcher makes a cameo appearance in this novel, which explores women's appetites and ambitions, and suggests how they are often thwarted. Though Mantel used material from her own life, it is not an autobiographical novel.
Her next book, The Giant, O'Brien (1998), is set in the 1780s, and is based on the true story of Charles Byrne (or O'Brien). He came to London to earn money by displaying himself as a freak. His bones hang today in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. The novel treats O'Brien and his antagonist, the Scots surgeon John Hunter, less as characters in history than as mythic protagonists in a dark and violent fairytale, necessary casualties of the Age of Enlightenment. She adapted the book for BBC Radio 4, in a play starring Alex Norton (as Hunter) and Frances Tomelty.
In 2003, Mantel published her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, which won the MIND "Book of the Year" award. That same year she brought out a collection of short stories, Learning To Talk. All the stories deal with childhood and, taken together, the books show how the events of a life are mediated as fiction. Her 2005 novel, Beyond Black, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2005. Novelist Pat Barker said it was "the book that should actually have won the Booker". Set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it features a professional medium, Alison Hart, whose calm and jolly exterior conceals grotesque psychic damage. She trails around with her a troupe of "fiends", who are invisible but always on the verge of becoming flesh.
The long novel Wolf Hall, about Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell, was published in 2009 to critical acclaim.Rubin, Martin (10 October 2009), "Book Review: Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall' Wall Street Journal. The book won that year's Booker Prize and, upon winning the award, Mantel said, "I can tell you at this moment I am happily flying through the air". Judges voted three to two in favour of Wolf Hall for the prize. Mantel was presented with a trophy and a £50,000 cash prize during an evening ceremony at the Guildhall, London. The panel of judges, led by the broadcaster James Naughtie, described Wolf Hall as an "extraordinary piece of storytelling". Leading up to the award, the book was backed as the favourite by bookmakers and accounted for 45% of the sales of all the nominated books. It was the first favourite since 2002 to win the award. On receiving the prize, Mantel said that she would spend the prize money on "sex and drugs and rock' n' roll".
The sequel to Wolf Hall, called Bring Up the Bodies, was published in May 2012 to wide acclaim. It won the Costa Book of the Year and the 2012 Man Booker Prize; Mantel thus became the first British writer and the first woman to win the Booker Prize more than once. Mantel was the fourth author to receive the award twice, following J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey and J. G. Farrell. This award also made Mantel the first author to win the award for a sequel. The books were adapted into plays by the Royal Shakespeare Company and were produced as a mini-series by BBC. In 2020 Mantel published the third novel of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, called The Mirror & the Light. The Mirror & the Light was selected for the longlist for the 2020 Booker Prize.
In 2014, Mantel published a collection of 10 short stories, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which The Guardian called a "flawed but absorbing selection" singling out the story Sorry to Disturb for praise. The New York Times described the collection as having "narrators much more outwardly meek and inwardly turbulent than the murderous royals and puppeteers so beloved in her historical fiction". The controversial title story is about an assassin who disguises himself as a plumber and takes over an apartment opposite the hospital where the Prime Minister is undergoing eye surgery. The woman who owns the apartment, and who is in effect a hostage, turns out to be surprisingly sympathetic to the assassin's cause.
She was also working on a short non-fiction book, titled The Woman Who Died of Robespierre, about the Polish playwright Stanisława Przybyszewska. Mantel also wrote reviews and essays, mainly for The Guardian, the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books. The Culture Show programme on BBC Two broadcast a profile of Mantel on 17 September 2011.
In December 2016, Mantel spoke with The Kenyon Review editor David H. Lynn on the KR PodcastLynn, David H. (5 December 2016), "KR Podcast with Hilary Mantel", Kenyon Review. about the way historical novels are published, what it is like to live in the world of one character for more than ten years, writing for the stage, and the final book in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror & the Light.
She delivered five 2017 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio Four, talking about the theme of historical fiction. Her final one of these lectures was on the theme of adaptation of historical novels for stage or screen. Mantel's lectures were selected by its producer, Jim Frank, as amongst the best of the long-running series.
At the time of her death in 2022, Mantel was working on a new novel which was characterized as a "mash-up" of Jane Austen novels.
The condition, and what was considered at the time to be a necessary treatment – a surgical menopause at the age of 27 – left her unable to have children and continued to disrupt her life. She later said, "you've thought your way through questions of fertility and menopause and what it means to be without children because it all happened catastrophically." This led Mantel to see the problematised woman's body as a theme in her writing. She later became patron of the Endometriosis SHE Trust.
Mantel has said of pain that "you have to find a way of living with it and living around it." She used autogenic training as one tool in living with her conditions.
These remarks stimulated substantial public debate. The Leader of the Opposition Ed Miliband and Prime Minister David Cameron both criticised Mantel's remarks, while Jemima Khan defended Mantel. Zing Tsjeng praised the LRB essay, finding the "clarity of prose and analysis is just incredible".
In a 2013 interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mantel stated: "I think that nowadays the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people. ... When I was a child I wondered why priests and nuns were not nicer people. I thought that they were amongst the worst people I knew." These statements, as well as the themes explored in her earlier novel Fludd, led the Catholic bishop Mark O'Toole to comment: "There is an anti-Catholic thread there, there is no doubt about it. Wolf Hall is not neutral."
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