Hilary Mantel (1952–2022), award-winning author of “Wolf Hall”
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2 min readHilary Mantel was a British author who won the prestigious Booker Prize twice, for her novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies.”
- Died: September 22, 2022 (Who else died on September 22?)
- Details of death: Died at a hospital in Exeter, England after a stroke at the age of 70.
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Literary career
Mantel was best known for her historical fiction, but that wasn’t how she began her career. Her first novel was the 1985 dark comedy “Every Day is Mother’s Day,” followed by its 1986 sequel, “Vacant Possession.” It was with her 1992 fifth novel, “A Place of Greater Safety, - written a decade and a half earlier but long unpublished – that she began writing historical fiction, telling a story of the French Revolution. Mantel’s best-known novel was 2009’s “Wolf Hall,” the first of a trilogy chronicling the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. Its sequels were 2012’s “Bring Up the Bodies” and 2020’s “The Mirror & the Light,” Mantel’s final book. In 2015, Mantel was named Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, by then-Prince Charles.
Mantel on Cromwell
“One of the things I’m really exploring is the universal question of what’s luck? What’s fate? Does anybody make their own luck? How far can you write your own story? And he’s someone whose whole career ought not to be possible. But at some point in early middle age, he just grabs the pen and starts writing it.” —from a 2020 interview for the Guardian
Tributes to Hilary Mantel
Full obituary: The New York Times
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