Best-selling author Dame Hilary Mantel has died

Mantel was best known for her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.

Author Dame Hilary Mantel has passed away at the age of 70.

Hannah Mackay

British author and lawyer Dame Hilary Mantel passed away on Friday at the age of 70, her publisher confirmed on Friday morning. A statement said, “We are heartbroken at the passing of our beloved author, Dame Hilary.” Mantel’s death is a devastating loss. “We can only be grateful that she left us such a great work,” it said.

Mantel was born in Derbyshire, England, in 1952 and studied law at the London School of Economics. She worked as a social worker and lived for extended periods in Botswana and Saudi Arabia before returning to the UK in the mid-1980s. She married geologist Gerald McEwan in 1972. The couple later divorced but remarried soon after. Mantel first worked as a film critic for Spectator magazine, but then began writing her own novels.

The novelist was widely known as a writer of historical novels, most notably the three-part Thomas Cromwell series comprising the works ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bring up the Bodies’, which was also staged as a theater by the Royal Shakespeare Company and later were broadcast by the BBC as a television series and dealt with the rise of Thomas Cromwell to power at the court of Henry VIII.

«The essence is not to judge afterwards»

In an interview with The Guardian, Hilary Mantel once said it took years to research the books to ensure they were historically accurate accounts. She said her goal was to transport the reader to “this time and place and to place you in King Henry’s entourage. The essence of the matter is that we should not judge historical events in hindsight, because we, on the august throne of the 21st century, know the outcome,” she said. “What’s important in a historical novel is that the reader has the feeling of being personally involved in the events – even if they happened hundreds of years ago.”

The English productions were also broadcast in German-speaking countries. In 2018, for example, Westdeutscher Rundfunk WDR produced a 26-part radio play series from her novel “Brüder”. Mantel’s latest work “Mirror and Light” about Thomas Cromwell was published in 2020.

Mantel has received numerous awards for her work

She has received various awards for her work. In 2009 she received the Booker Prize, the most important English literary prize, for her novel «Wolf Hall». She was the first woman to win the Booker Prize twice. In 2010 she was awarded the Walter Scott Prize for the novel. In 2015, this novel was voted one of the most important works of the century to date by the BBC’s selection of the best 20 novels from 2000 to 2014.

In 2014, Queen Elizabeth II appointed Mantel a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and thus knighted her. Mantel also appeared in the BBC’s important lecture series “Reith Lectures”, which is broadcast internationally and held a multi-part lecture series in 2017.

Since 2020, she has been one of twelve people to hold the title of “Companion of Literature”, the highest award from the British Royal Society of Literature.

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