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Booker Prize winning novelist and author of Wolf Hall Dame Hilary Mantel dies aged 70-Meghna Amin-Entertainment – Metro
Dame Hilary authored the Wolf Hall trilogy.
The award-winning author has died aged 70 (Picture: Rex/BBC)
Booker Prize winning novelist and author of Wolf Hall trilogy Dame Hilary Mantel has died aged 70, her literary agents announced.
Dame Hilary was best known for her historical trilogy Wolf Hall, about the life of Thomas Cromwell, which later became made it to TV screens and became a hit West End show.
Her literary agency 4th Estate Books announced on Twitter: ‘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.
‘This is a devastating loss and we can only be grateful she left us with such a magnificent body of work.’
Dame Hilary won the Man 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 ground-breaking The Wolf Hall Trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, was published in 2020 to huge critical acclaim, an instant number one fiction best-seller and longlisted for The Booker Prize 2020 and winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, which she first won for Wolf Hall.
Paying tribute, publishers HarperCollins described Dame Hilary as ‘one of the greatest English novelists of this century.’
Their statement went on: ‘Her beloved works are considered modern classics. She will be greatly missed.’
Mark Rylance stars as Thomas Cromwell in the TV adaptation of Dame Hilary’s Wolf Hall (Picture: BBC)
As well as Wolf Hall, Dame Hilary has authored seventeen acclaimed books including The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Vacant Possession and Every Day is Mother’s Day.
As well as this, her non-fiction work includes memoir Giving up the Ghost as well as a photography collaboration The Wolf Hall Picture Book.
In 1990 Dame Hilary was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2006 was awarded a CBE and in 2014 she was appointed DBE.
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Dame Hilary was born in Derbyshire in 1952 and studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University.
She later worked as a social worker and lived in Botswana for five years and Saudi Arabia for four years before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s.
Dame Hilary married geologist Gerald McEwan in 1972, before they divorced in 1981 and remarried the year later.
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