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Hilary Mantel, the Booker Prize-winning author who turned Tudor power politics into page-turning fiction in the acclaimed „Wolf Hall“ trilogy of historical novels, has died, her publisher said Friday. She was 70.
Mantel died „suddenly yet peacefully“ on Thursday while surrounded by close family and friends, publisher HarperCollins said.
Mantel is credited with reenergizing historical fiction with Wolf Hall and two sequels about the 16th-century English powerbroker Thomas Cromwell, right-hand man to King Henry VIII.
The publisher said Mantel was „one of the greatest English novelists of this century.“
„Her beloved works are considered modern classics. She will be greatly missed,“ it said in a statement.
Mantel won the prestigious Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall in 2009 and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies in 2012. Both were adapted for the stage and television.
The trilogy’s final installment, The Mirror and the Light, was published in 2020.
Nicholas Pearson, Mantel’s longtime editor, said her death was „devastating.“
„Only last month I sat with her on a sunny afternoon in Devon, while she talked excitedly about the new novel she had embarked on,“ he said. „That we won’t have the pleasure of any more of her words is unbearable. What we do have is a body of work that will be read for generations.“
Before Wolf Hall, Mantel was the critically acclaimed but modestly selling author of novels on subjects ranging from the French Revolution (A Place of Greater Safety) to the life of a psychic medium (Beyond Black).
She also wrote a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, that chronicled years of ill-health, including undiagnosed endometriosis that left her infertile.
