Dame Hilary Mary Mantel

Hilary Mary Thompson was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, to a working-class Roman Catholic family of Irish descent. She studied law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University before living in Botswana and Saudi Arabia with her geologist husband, experiences that inspired early novels including Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.

Mantel revolutionized historical fiction by reinventing Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's powerful, enigmatic chief minister, traditionally portrayed as a cold villain. Written in an electrifying present-tense, close-third-person voice, Wolf Hall (2009) won the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Its 2012 sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, dramatizing the fall of Anne Boleyn, won the Booker Prize again—making Mantel the first woman and first British author to win the prize twice. She concluded the monumental trilogy in 2020 with The Mirror & the Light. Appointed DBE in 2014, Mantel is celebrated as one of the greatest English prose stylists of the 21st century.