Mantel had been a published novelist for almost 25 years when her first book about Cromwell turned her into a literary superstar. In the 1970s and 1980s she lived in Botswana and Saudi Arabia with her husband, Gerald McEwen, a geologist. 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. “We will miss her immeasurably, but as a shining light for writers and readers she leaves an extraordinary legacy,” he said.īorn in Derbyshire in central England in 1952, Mantel attended a convent school, then studied at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University.
Mantel’s literary agent, Bill Hamilton, said the author had dealt “stoically” with chronic health problems. She once said the years of illness wrecked her dream of becoming a lawyer but made her a writer. She also wrote a memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost,” that chronicled years of ill-health, including undiagnosed endometriosis that left her infertile. What we do have is a body of work that will be read for generations.”īefore “Wolf Hall,” Mantel 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”). “That we won’t have the pleasure of any more of her words is unbearable. “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. Nicholas Pearson, Mantel’s longtime editor, said her death was “devastating.” The trilogy’s final instalment, “The Mirror and the Light,” was published in 2020. Both were adapted for the stage and television. Mantel won the prestigious Booker Prize twice, for “Wolf Hall” in 2009 and its sequel “Bring Up the Bodies” in 2012. She will be greatly missed,” it said in a statement. “Her beloved works are considered modern classics.
The publisher said Mantel was “one of the greatest English novelists of this century.” 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. WATCH: Bringing the Tudors to television and Broadway in ‘Wolf Hall’ Mantel died “suddenly yet peacefully” on Thursday while surrounded by close family and friends, publisher HarperCollins said. 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.
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