: Hilary Mantel (1952-2022) was one of the great voices of historical fiction – and so much more #IndiaNEWS Dame Hilary Mantel was a writer of immense skill and originality, and her death represents

Hilary Mantel (1952-2022) was one of the great voices of historical fiction – and so much more #IndiaNEWS
Dame Hilary Mantel was a writer of immense skill and originality, and her death represents an incalculable loss to British literature. She will be chiefly remembered for her trilogy on the life of the Tudor politician Thomas Cromwell.The grace and vigour of these gripping novels transformed our understanding of what historical fiction can do. They were extraordinarily successful. Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) both won the Booker Prize (she was the first woman to win the prize more than once), and The Mirror and the Light (2020) was longlisted. I was a member of the jury that awarded the Booker Prize to Bring Up the Bodies, and we were of one mind about the superb quality of that novel.Adaptations for both television and stage followed, and it is a tribute to the power of Mantel’s exploration of the ambiguities surrounding Cromwell’s dramatic life that these versions brought many enthusiastic new readers to her novels. She became, relatively late in her life, a literary star.The popularity of Mantel’s trilogy should not overshadow the remarkable range of her achievement. Her treatment of Thomas Cromwell brought a mass readership, but the accomplishment of her earlier novels had already won critical recognition.A writer’s lifeMantel graduated from LSE and Sheffield University, and married Gerald McEwan,...Read more

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