LONDON — Hilary Mantel, the best\u002Dselling British author of the award\u002Dwinning “Wolf Hall” Tudor trilogy, died peacefully on Thursday at the age of 70, her…
“Wolf Hall,” published in 2009, and its sequel “Bring Up the Bodies,” released three years later, both won the Booker Prize, an unprecedented win for two books in the same trilogy and making Mantel the first woman to win the award twice.Sign up to receive daily headline news from Ottawa Citizen, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.By clicking on the sign up button you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.
The “Wolf Hall” trilogy, which has been serialized by the BBC and was also adapted for the stage, charted the fortunes of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son who rose to be King Henry VIII’s most powerful adviser only to fall from grace and meet a gruesome end.In a 2020 interview with the Guardian, Mantel described the books as being “about all the big important things that matter, about sex and power and high politics, statecraft and forgery and delusion and lies.
Mantel also lived in Saudi Arabia, returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. Her first novel, “Every Day is Mother’s Day,” was published in 1985. Mantel drew criticism from many, including then Prime Minister David Cameron, in 2013 for comments in which she described Prince William’s then pregnant wife Kate as “a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung.”
She said her illness, and the infertility caused by treatment she received for it, had contributed to a temporary split from her geologist husband Gerald McEwen, whom she had wed at the age of 20. The pair divorced but soon remarried.Article content