Author profile

British writer Dame Hilary Mantel was brought up in Derbyshire and Cheshire. She graduated in law from the University of Sheffield and later spent several years living in Jeddah and Botswana. She was the first woman to win the Booker Prize twice, firstly for her fictional account of Thomas Cromwell’s ascent to power, Wolf Hall, (2009, Folio 2022) and secondly for its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012, Folio 2023). The third book in her trilogy, The Mirror and the Light (2020, Folio 2024), was longlisted in 2020. The trilogy won Mantel worldwide renown, but long before her immersion in the world of Tudor England, she was regarded as one of Britain’s finest novelists, short story writers and cultural critics. With A Place of Greater Safety (1992) she first explored the potential of historical fiction, but she has ranged widely, publishing Gothic novels (Beyond Black, 2005) and a book set in contemporary Saudi Arabia, for example. Her many awards include the Walter Scott Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award and the British Academy President’s Medal. Mantel’s most recent book, Mantel Pieces (2020), collects her remarkable and incisive essays published in the London Review of Books over three decades.

Photography © George Miles