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| Photo Credit: AP. |
LONDON (AP) — Hilary Mantel, the Booker Prize-winning author who turned Tudor power politics into page-turning fiction in the acclaimed “Wolf Hall” trilogy of historical novels, has died, her publisher said Friday. She was 70.
Mantel died
“suddenly yet peacefully” on Thursday surrounded by close family and friends
after suffering a stroke, publisher HarperCollins said.
Mantel is credited
with reenergizing historical fiction with “Wolf Hall” and two sequels about the
16th-century English powerbroker Thomas Cromwell, right-hand man to King Henry
VIII — and in Mantel’s hands, the charismatic antihero of a bloody, high-stakes
political drama.
The
publisher said Mantel was “one of the greatest English novelists of this
century.”
“Her beloved
works are considered modern classics. She will be greatly missed,” it said in a
statement.
Author J.K.
Rowling tweeted: “We’ve lost a genius.” Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon
said it is “impossible to overstate the significance of the literary legacy
Hilary Mantel leaves behind.”
Mantel won
the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction twice, for “Wolf Hall” in 2009 and its
sequel “Bring Up the Bodies” in 2012. Both were adapted for the stage and
television.
Nicholas
Pearson, Mantel’s longtime editor, said her death was “devastating.”
“Only last
month I sat with her on a sunny afternoon in Devon, while she talked excitedly
about the new novel she had embarked on,” he said. “That we won’t 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.”
Born in
Derbyshire in central England in 1952, Mantel attended a convent school, then
studied at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She worked
as a social worker at a geriatric hospital, an experience she drew on for her
first two novels, “Every Day Is Mother’s Day,” published in 1985, and “Vacant
Possession,” which followed the next year.
In the 1970s
and 1980s she lived in Botswana and Saudi Arabia with her husband, Gerald McEwen,
a geologist. She drew on her time in Saudi Arabia for the 1988 novel “Eight
Months on Ghazzah Street.”
Mantel had
been a published novelist for almost 25 years when her first book about
Cromwell made her a literary superstar. Before “Wolf Hall,” she was the
critically acclaimed but modestly selling author of novels on subjects ranging
from the French Revolution (“A Place of Greater Safety”) to the life of a psychic
medium (“Beyond Black”).
“For most of
my career I wrote about odd and marginal people,” Mantel said in 2017. “They
were psychic. Or religious. Or institutionalized. Or social workers. Or French.
My readers were a small and select band, until I decided to march on to the
middle ground of English history and plant a flag.”
Mantel
turned Cromwell, a 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 — and later, to be rid of Boleyn so he could
marry Jane Seymour, the third of what would be Henry’s six wives.
The
Vatican’s refusal to annul Henry’s 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 “A Man for All Seasons” to “The
Tudors.”
But Mantel
managed to make the well-known story exciting and suspenseful.
“I’m very
keen on the idea that a historical novel should be written pointing forward,”
she told The Associated Press in 2009. “Remember that the people you are
following didn’t 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.”
Mantel also
turned a sharp eye to Britain’s modern-day royalty. A 2013 lecture in which she
described the former Kate Middleton, wife of Prince William, as a “shop-window
mannequin, with no personality of her own” drew the ire of the British tabloid
press.
Mantel said
she wasn’t talking about the duchess herself but rather describing a view of
Kate constructed by the press and public opinion. The author nonetheless
received criticism from then-Prime Minister David Cameron, among others.
Right-wing
commentators also took issue with a short story entitled “The Assassination of
Margaret Thatcher,” which imagined an attack on the former Conservative leader.
It was published in 2014, the same year Queen Elizabeth II made Mantel a dame,
the female equivalent of a knight.
Mantel
remained politically outspoken. An opponent of Brexit, she said in 2021 that
she hoped to gain Irish citizenship and become “a European again.”
In addition
to her fiction, Mantel wrote a 2003 memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost,” that
chronicled years of ill-health, including long-undiagnosed endometriosis,
surgery for which left her infertile.
She once
said the years of illness wrecked her dream of becoming a lawyer but made her a
writer.
Mantel’s
literary agent, Bill Hamilton, said the author had dealt “stoically” with
chronic health problems.
“We will
miss her immeasurably, but as a shining light for writers and readers she
leaves an extraordinary legacy,” he said.
Mantel is
survived by her husband.