Hilary Mantel

2022 - 9 - 23

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Image courtesy of "CBC.ca"

Booker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel dead at 70 | CBC News (CBC.ca)

Hilary Mantel, the best-selling British author known for her award-winning Wolf Hall historical trilogy, died on Thursday at the age of 70, her publisher ...

We are heartbroken at the death of our beloved author, Dame Hilary Mantel, and our thoughts are with her friends and family, especially her husband, Gerald. "That we won't have the pleasure of any more of her words is unbearable. The Vatican's refusal to annul Henry's first marriage led the monarch to reject the authority of the pope and install himself as head of the Church of England. But Mantel managed to make the well-known story new and exciting. The success of Wolf Hall propelled Mantel from a critically acclaimed but modestly selling novelist into a literary superstar. Mantel won the Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall in 2009 and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies in 2012.

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Image courtesy of "Vogue.com"

'Wolf Hall' Author Hilary Mantel Has Died at 70 (Vogue.com)

It's just an enormous loss to literature,” her longtime literary agent Bill Hamilton said in a statement.

Yet Mantel found her biggest audience with Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012), and The Mirror and the Light (2020), three books about Thomas Cromwell, a powerful adviser to Henry VIII. Mantel’s first published novel, Every Day Is Mother’s Day (1985), emerged from a particularly trying time in her life: Her marriage to McEwan had faltered (the pair divorced in 1981 before remarrying a year later), and in her late 20s Mantel fell severely ill with what she later concluded was severe endometriosis. It, too, was adapted for the stage, opening at the Gielgud Theatre in London in 2021. Raised in Hadfield, Derbyshire, Mantel read law at the London School of Economics before transferring to the University of Sheffield to study law theory, earning her bachelor’s there in 1973. She married her husband, geologist Gerald McEwen, that same year, and in 1974 began work on A Place of Greater Safety, a novel about the French Revolution that would not sell for nearly 20 years. Mantel was, per Hamilton, working on a new novel at the time of her death.

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Image courtesy of "CNN"

Hilary Mantel, acclaimed 'Wolf Hall' author, dead at 70 (CNN)

Hilary Mantel, the British author who twice won the Booker Prize, has died at the age of 70.

This is a devastating loss and we can only be grateful she left us with such a magnificent body of work." "You wait 20 years for a Booker prize and then two come along at once," the author mused as she received the award, according to A stage version, adapted jointly by Mantel and actor Ben Miles, came to London's West End in 2021. After studying Law for one year at London's School of Economics, she transferred to Sheffield University and graduated in 1973. Hilary Mantel was one of the greatest English novelists of this century and her beloved works are considered modern classics. Heath and HarperCollins announce that bestselling author Dame Hilary Mantel DBE died suddenly yet peacefully yesterday, surrounded by close family and friends, aged 70.

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Image courtesy of "Le Soleil"

Hilary Mantel, des fantômes et des livres (Le Soleil)

Hilary Mantel a longtemps communié avec les fantômes, ceux de l'histoire qui habitent ses romans, de ses ancêtres catholiques irlandais, des enfants qu'elle ...

L’intervention la rend infertile et les traitements hormonaux entraînent une prise de poids rapide, un double traumatisme qu’elle a détaillé dans son autobiographie. Les médecins l’ont jugée «hystérique, névrosée, difficile» et l’ont mise sous psychotropes. Elle y explique avoir perdu la foi à l’âge de onze ans, quand elle a vu son père pour la dernière fois.

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Image courtesy of "Le Journal de Québec"

La romancière britannique Hilary Mantel, deux fois lauréate du prix ... (Le Journal de Québec)

«C'est avec une grande tristesse qu'HarperCollins annonce que l'autrice à succès Dame Hilary Mantel est morte paisiblement, entourée de sa famille et de ses ...

(...) Sa compagnie, sa sagesse, son humour nous manqueront à tous, et nous chérirons son incroyable héritage littéraire», lui a rendu hommage Charlie Redmayne, PDG d’HarperCollins au Royaume-Uni, cité dans le communiqué. Le dernier volet, «Le Miroir et la Lumière», publié en 2020, avait aussi été salué par la critique, et entraîné des files d’attentes devant les librairies le jour de sa sortie. Les deux premiers volets de la série traduite dans 41 langues, «Dans l’ombre des Tudor» et «Le Pouvoir», lui ont valu de remporter deux fois le prestigieux prix Booker.

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Image courtesy of "The New York Times"

Hilary Mantel Stared Down Her Past, and the World's, With Steely ... (The New York Times)

This fictional portrait of Henry VIII's scheming aide Thomas Cromwell — the first volume of Mantel's celebrated trilogy — won the Booker Prize in 2009. “'Wolf ...

But for now I am thinking of the poignant ending of “The Mirror and the Light,” the final book in the Cromwell trilogy. (For her part, Mantel said she was “bemused” at the suggestion that “the police should interest themselves in the case of a fictional assassination of a person who was already dead.”) Having helped effect the deaths of so many of Henry’s enemies, Cromwell finds that he is to meet the same fate. He feels for an opening, blinded, looking for a door: tracking the light along the wall.” As her agent, Bill Hamilton, said upon the news of her death: “She had so many great novels ahead of her.” There is a lot more to read, and reread. Though the themes of women suffering from pain, isolation and domestic weariness recur in her fiction, she didn’t make her own history the focus of her persona; she was not one to seek pity. For me, her books show that great literature, the kind that marries meticulous craft and deep understanding of human nature, can require work on the part of the reader. It was a shock to see her speak in person and realize how funny she was. Dead for more than 400 years, reduced to caricature as a thug and a brute in the famous Holbein portrait that hangs in the Frick Museum, Cromwell here feels shimmeringly alive, full of pathos. There were nine other novels, demonstrating her ability to write in a range of styles about various subjects and in various time periods. She brings great precision to her writing, as opaque as it sometimes feels, and asks the same of us in our reading. At first, the prose is disorienting.

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Image courtesy of "BBC News"

Hilary Mantel: Friend and broadcaster Jan Rogers pays tribute (BBC News)

A close friend of Dame Hilary Mantel has paid tribute to the "attentive, generous and very funny" Wolf Hall author, following her death, aged 70.

"We went to an Italian restaurant where I quoted huge tracts of her work back to her. "She was tremendously accurate whenever she did write anything that was based on truth. I think she was probably one of the most attentive people you could meet. No two books were alike, she was very interested in people's minds. "I watched peacefully at the back of the talk and the librarian who booked her said to me: 'I never know to say to authors', so she asked me to go to dinner with them," she said. "She was very aware of what the other person was going through, she never forgot to ask what was going on, she was extremely kind, generous and very funny.

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Image courtesy of "The Atlantic"

Hilary Mantel's Art Was Infused With Her Pain (The Atlantic)

The death of the British novelist is occasion to remember her genius as well as the chronic illness that shaped her work.

In her 20s, she developed a case of endometriosis severe enough to make her vomit and have so much pain in her limbs and organs that she couldn’t walk. The behavior of a woman’s reproductive organs may be the difference between life and death. A hormonal condition associated with endometriosis induces migraines and, in her case, “the migraine aura that made my words come out wrong” and “morbid visions, like visitations, premonitions of dissolution.” Once Mantel received a proper diagnosis, she was put on medication that made her balloon. But now blood spurts out of the queen’s neck, we are in the third act of the tragedy, and Mantel has added to the list of Cromwell’s powers the ability to turn his back on horror and think about food, as callow as a king. [Giving Up the Ghost](https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780312423629), Mantel reveals the mystery of her method: “Eat meat. With masterly dispatch, she thrusts us into the middle of the action, tells us exactly where we are, and makes us gasp at a conjunction of things that we would never have thought could occupy the same moral universe—that is, decapitation and a second breakfast.

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Image courtesy of "The New York Times"

Opinion | Hilary Mantel Was the Magician and the Spell (The New York Times)

LONDON — I remember standing with Hilary Mantel in the offices of the literary agency we shared. It was autumn 2008, several months before “Wolf Hall” was ...

And it is also a reminder that one of the great gifts of Hilary Mantel is her skewering wit. We were nearing the end of a decade that had taught me to be very nervous about any writer who was not Muslim writing about Muslims. When I heard we had lost her, the writing I found myself returning to was a 2009 memoir, “ Cromwell’s appetite for food intrigued her as much as his appetite for power, and she knew how to write about both in ways that spoke to each other, simultaneously in the 16th and 21st centuries. She seemed to see so clearly the things — the past, the spirit world, the intricate relationship between the self and power — the rest of us saw through gauze or not at all. LONDON — I remember standing with Hilary Mantel in the offices of the literary agency we shared.

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