Hilary Mantel

British · 1952 to 2022

Born Hilary Mary Thompson on July 6, 1952, in Glossop, Derbyshire, the eldest child of Catholic parents of Irish descent, she was raised in the mill village of Hadfield, where her mother's lover moved into the family home when she was seven and her father slept in another room. Four years later the family decamped to Cheshire to escape the gossip, she took her stepfather's surname Mantel, and she never saw her father again. She read law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield, married the geologist Gerald McEwen at twenty-one, and began the French Revolution novel that would eventually appear in 1992 as A Place of Greater Safety. She suffered from undiagnosed endometriosis for years; by the time it was identified she had lost her fertility and gained the steroidal weight she carried for the rest of her life. She and McEwen spent five years in Botswana and four in Jeddah, the latter the unhappiest period she would later mine for fiction. Her first published novel was Every Day Is Mother's Day (1985). Twelve more followed, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost (2003), the murderous Beyond Black (2005), and the Tudor trilogy that made her famous: Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012), and The Mirror and the Light (2020), narrating the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell from the inside of his own watchful mind. She is the only woman to have won the Booker Prize twice. She was made a Dame in 2014. She died after a stroke in Exeter on September 22, 2022, at seventy.