British author Hilary Mantel, who has won the Booker Prize twice, passed away at the age of 70 last Thursday (22), and tributes poured in from the literary world and beyond.
Mantel’s publisher Fourth Estate Books posted: “We are heartbroken at the death of our beloved author, Dame Hilary Mantel, and our thoughts are with her friends and family, especially her husband, Gerald. This is a devastating loss and we can only be grateful she left us with such a magnificent body of work.”
Mantel has authored 12 novels, including the “Thomas Cromwell” trilogy, which won her a Booker Prize for Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies (2012). Beyond Black and The Mirror and the Light have also been nominated for the Booker Prize.
About the author
Born in 1952, Mantel is known for rewriting history, and her first novel, Every Day is Mother’s Day, was published in 1985. A year later, its sequel, Vacant Possession was published. In 1988, she published Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, a political thriller set in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and a year later, Fludd, set in northern England, was published.
She went on to publish five more novels before the “Thomas Cromwell” trilogy, the last instalment of which, The Mirror and the Light, was published in 2020. The trilogy is about Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell, and is among her most well-received works. Mantel has also published two short story collections and several essays. In 2003, she published Giving Up the Ghost, a memoir about her anxiety-ridden childhood and later struggle with illness.
According to her agent, Bill Heath, Hilary Mantel died suddenly yet peacefully, surrounded by close friends and family. “Hilary Mantel was one of the greatest English novelists of this century and her beloved works are considered modern classics. She will be greatly missed,” he wrote.
Tribute from the literary world
The Guardian compiled tributes paid to Hilary Mantel, with author of Atonement and Enduring Love Ian McEwan saying: “To borrow John Updike’s phrase, Mantel gave history its beautiful due. In doing so, she deployed breathtaking resources of literary skill, and helped us know ourselves as a nation. The Wolf Hall trilogy will stand as her monument, but her backlist is full of wonders. She was also brilliant, witty company, with a distinctive mode of scepticism that was all her own.”
Columnist and author Caitlin Moran said: “Hilary Mantel’s mind was one of the most powerful and magic machines on Earth. We were lucky she wrote as much as she did, but holy hell, it’s devastating that we’ve collectively lost something so astonishing.”
“I was shocked and saddened to hear of Hilary Mantel’s death. It was always a pleasure to read such a smart, deft, meticulous, thoughtful writer, and one with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature – and a pleasure to review her too, which I did both early and late. A Place of Greater Safety was an eye-opener about the French Revolution, and the Cromwell trilogy was a well-known stunner. She never shied away from the difficult folks, and doled out a tad of redemption for even the most hardened cases. What might she have written next? I don’t know, but I will miss it,” The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood said.