The acclaimed writer, who received the prestigious award for two of the books in her historic “Wolf Hall” trilogy, died peacefully on Thursday surrounded by close family and friends, according to her agent.
Mantel was born in 1952 in Derbyshire, England. After studying law for a year at the London School of Economics, she moved to Sheffield University and graduated in 1973.
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From 1987 to 1991 she was a film critic for the British cultural magazine The Spectator and published her first novel Every Day is Mother’s Day in 1985.
But it wasn’t until the publication of her tenth novel, Wolf Hall, in 2009 that Mantel became a household name.
Set in Tudor English, Wolf Hall focuses on the life and times of Henry VIII’s statesman and Prime Minister Thomas Cromwell. “Wolf Hall” won the Booker Prize in 2009.
A 2015 TV adaptation of “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII, was nominated for eight Primetime Emmys.
In 2020, eight years after the release of Bring Up the Bodies, came the eagerly awaited final installment in the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. A stage version, co-adapted by Mantel and actor Ben Miles, came to London’s West End in 2021.
Ever since news of her death broke, tributes from the literary world have flooded social media. Fourth Estate, the original publisher of Wolf Hall, tweeted his condolences, writing, “We are heartbroken at the death of our beloved author, Dame Hilary Mantel, and our thoughts go out to her friends and family, especially hers Husband. gerald It is a devastating loss and we can only be grateful that she left us such a great body of work.”
“We’ve lost a genius,” tweeted Harry Potter author JK Rowling.
