British Novelist and Booker Prize Winner Hilary Mantel Passes Away At 70

Mantel won the Booker Prize twice, once in 2009 and for the second time in 2012.

Hilary Mantel

(Photo: Accessed by TheQuint)

Booker Prize winning novelist Dame Hilary Mantel passed away at the age of 70, publisher Harper Collins confirmed.

The author of the Wolf Hall trilogy was regarded as one of the greatest English novelists of this century.

She won the Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which also won the 2012 Costa Book of the Year.

The conclusion to her Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was published in 2020 to huge critical acclaim and was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020. Wolf Hall was a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII.

Born on 6 July 1952 in Glossop, Derbyshire in England, she was the first woman to receive the Booker Prize twice.

Till date, the Wolf Hall trilogy has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 41 languages.

She experienced chronic illness throughout her adult life, having a severe form of endometriosis that left her unable to have children.

Ben Hamilton, who was Mantel’s agent throughout her career, told The Guardian that it had been “the greatest privilege” to work with the writer. “Her wit, stylistic daring, creative ambition and phenomenal historical insight mark her out as one of the greatest novelists of our time.”

(With inputs from The Guardian.)