Dame Hilary Mantel author of Wolf Hall trilogy, died aged 70

Dame Hilary Mantel,  author of the best-selling Wolf Hall Trilogy and won the Booker Prize twice for 2009’s Wolf Hall, the first in the Thomas Cromwell series and its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies, died on Thursday aged 70.

 

Dame Hilary was an intense and troubling writer, and her subjects were odd and unpredictable. Dame Hilary said, “ As soon as we die, we enter into fiction. Just ask two different family members to tell you about someone recently gone and you’ll see what I mean. Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted. And when we remember, as psychologists so often tell us we don’t reproduce the past, we create it.”

Dame Hilary’s Wolf Hall was a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in the court of Henry VIII. The third and final book in the series, The Mirror and the Light was published in 2020 to much critical acclaim, became a fiction best-seller, and was longlisted for The Booker Prize 2020. The trilogy sold more than five million copies globally and has been translated into 41 languages.

Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up The Bodies were turned into a six-part BBC TV series starring Sir Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell, Damian Lewis as Henry VIII, and Clare Foy as Anne Boleyn.

The two books were also adapted for the stage as did a 2021 adaptation of the third novel in the trilogy, The Mirror, and the Light.

Actor and playwright Ben Miles, who helped Dame Hilary bring her work to the stage, described her as “an extraordinary woman”, as well as a good friend and a close colleague”.

JK Rowling,  tweeted  “ We’ve lost a genius”. Kate Mosse paid tribute to Dame Hilary Mantel, saying she changed the face of literature and said “ Dame Hilary change the face of how modern readers saw historical fiction. She was a very great writer.. she kind of just had this exquisite way of capturing a place in a time within three sentences. The thing about Hilary Mantel was that she was a woman of extraordinary principle, she said what she thought, she wrote what she thought, and she believed in the idea that your writing was your soul. If you like, out there.”

The President of the Royal Society of Literature, Bernardine Evaristo said she was “so sorry” to hear the news and that she felt “so lucky to have such a massive talent in our midst”.