Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel
Born	Hilary Mary Thompson (1952-07-06) 6 July 1952 Glossop, Derbyshire, England, UK
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer and critic
Nationality	British
Alma mater	University of Sheffield
Notable works	Wolf Hall (2009)
Notable awards	Man Booker Prize (2009)

Hilary Mary Mantel CBE (/mænˈtɛl/ man-TEL; born 6 July 1952), née Thompson, is an English novelist, short story writer and critic. Her work, ranging in subject from personal memoir to historical fiction, has been short-listed for major literary awards. In 2009, she won the Man Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall.

Early life

She was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, the eldest of three children, and was brought up in the Derbyshire mill village of Hadfield, attending the local Roman Catholic primary school. Her parents, Margaret and Henry Thompson, were both born in England, of Irish descent. Her parents separated and she did not see her father after age eleven. Jack Mantel moved in and became her unofficial stepfather and she took his surname. Her family background, the mainspring of much of her fiction, is explained in her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. She lost her religious faith at age 12 and says that this left a permanent mark on her: the "real cliche, the sense of guilt. You grow up believing that you're wrong and bad. And for me, because I took what I was told really seriously, it bred a very intense habit of introspection and self-examination and a terrible severity with myself. So that nothing was ever good enough. It's like installing a policeman, and one moreover who keeps changing the law."

Mantel attended Harrytown Convent in Romiley, Cheshire (now Romiley, Greater Manchester). In 1970 she began her studies at the London School of Economics to read law. She transferred to the University of Sheffield and graduated as Bachelor of Jurisprudence in 1973.

Career and health

After university, Mantel worked in the social work department of a geriatric hospital, and then as a sales assistant in a department store. In 1974 she began writing a novel about the French Revolution, which was later published as A Place of Greater Safety.

In 1977 Mantel went to live in Botswana with her husband, Gerald McEwen, a geologist, whom she had married in 1972. Later they spent four years in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia – she published a memoir of this time, "Someone to Disturb", in the London Review of Books. Leaving Jeddah gave her the feeling that it was "the best day of my life". During her twenties, she suffered from a debilitating and painful illness. This was initially diagnosed as a psychiatric illness, for which she was hospitalised and treated with anti-psychotic drugs. These paradoxically produced psychotic symptoms; as a consequence, for some years she refrained from seeking help from doctors. Finally, in Botswana and desperate, she consulted a medical text-book and realised she was probably suffering from a severe form of endometriosis, a diagnosis confirmed by doctors in London. The condition and necessary surgery left her unable to have children and continued to disrupt her life, with continued treatment by steroids causing weight gain and radically changing her appearance. She was patron of the Endometriosis SHE Trust.

Literary career

Her first novel, Every Day is Mother's Day, was published in 1985, and its sequel, Vacant Possession, a year later. Returning to England, she became the film critic of The Spectator and a reviewer for a number of papers and magazines in Britain and the United States.

Her novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), which drew on her first-hand experience in Saudi Arabia, uses the dangerous clash of values between the neighbours in a city apartment block to illustrate the tensions between Islam and the liberal West. Her Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize-winning novel Fludd is set in 1956 in a fictitious northern village called Fetherhoughton, and centres on the convent and Roman Catholic church. A mysterious stranger brings about alchemical transformation in the lives of the downtrodden, the depressed and the despised.

A Place of Greater Safety (1992) won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award, for which her two previous books had been shortlisted. A long novel written with a close eye on historical accuracy, it traces the career of three revolutionaries, Danton, Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, from childhood to their early deaths during the Reign of Terror of 1794.

A Change of Climate (1994), set in rural Norfolk, explores the lives of Ralph and Anna Eldred, raising their four children and devoting their lives to charity. It includes chapters about their early married life as missionaries in South Africa, when they were imprisoned and deported to Bechuanaland, and the tragedy that occurred there.

An Experiment in Love, which won the Hawthornden Prize, takes place over two university terms in 1970, and follows the progress of three girls – two friends and one enemy – as they leave home for university in London. Mrs Thatcher makes a cameo appearance in a novel that explores women’s appetites and ambitions and suggests how they are often thwarted. Though Mantel has used material from her own life, it is not an autobiographical novel.

Her next book, The Giant, O’Brien, is set in the 1780s and is based on the true story of Charles O’Brien or Byrne, who came to London to exhibit himself as a freak. His bones hang today in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. The novel treats O’Brien and his antagonist, the Scots surgeon John Hunter, less as characters in history than as mythic protagonists in a dark and violent fairytale, necessary casualties of the Age of Enlightenment. Mantel adapted the book for BBC Radio 4, in a play starring Lloyd Hutchinson as the Giant, Alex Norton as John Hunter, and Frances Tomelty and Deborah Finley as two of the women who cross their path.

In 2003 Mantel published her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, which won the MIND ‘Book of the Year’ award. That same year she brought out a collection of short stories, Learning To Talk. All the stories deal with childhood and, taken together, the books show how the events of a life are mediated into fiction. Her 2005 novel, Beyond Black, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Set in the years around the millennium, it features a professional medium, Alison Hart, whose calm and jolly exterior conceals grotesque psychic damage. She trails around with her a troupe of ‘fiends’ who are invisible but always on the verge of becoming flesh.

Some comparison has been made between Mantel's work and that of Muriel Spark.

Mantel was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2006 Birthday Honours.

The long novel Wolf Hall, about Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell, was published in 2009 to high critical acclaim. The book went on to win that year's Man Booker Prize and upon winning the award, Mantel stated, "I can tell you at this moment I am happily flying through the air". Judges voted three to two in favour of Wolf Hall for the prize, with Mantel being presented with a trophy and a £50,000 cash prize during an evening ceremony at the London Guildhall. The panel of judges, led by the broadcaster James Naughtie, described Wolf Hall as an "extraordinary piece of storytelling". Leading up to the award, the book was backed as the favourite by bookmakers and accounted for 45% of all the nominated books' sales. By winning, it subsequently became the first favourite to win the award since 2002.

The sequel to Wolf Hall, called Bring Up the Bodies, was published in May 2012 to wide acclaim. She is now working on the third novel of the Henry VIII trilogy called The Mirror and the Light.She is also working on a short non-fiction book called The Woman Who Died of Robespierre, about the Polish playwright Stanisława Przybyszewska. Mantel also writes reviews and essays, mainly for The Guardian, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

The Culture Show programme on BBC Two broadcast a profile of Mantel on 17 September 2011.

Articles

• "What a man this is, with his crowd of women around him!", London Review of Books, 30 March 2000.
• "Some Girls Want Out", London Review of Books, v. 26 no. 5, pg 14-18, 4 March 2004. Describes extreme fasting for religious purposes as "holy anorexia", with a comparison with "secular anorexia", tying the two together as "social hypocrisy".
• "Diary", London Review of Books, 4 November 2010.

Bibliography

• Every Day is Mother's Day: Chatto & Windus, 1985
• Vacant Possession: Chatto & Windus, 1986
• Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: Viking, 1988
• Fludd: Viking, 1989
• A Place of Greater Safety: Viking, 1992
• A Change of Climate: Viking, 1994
• An Experiment in Love: Viking, 1995
• The Giant, O'Brien: Fourth Estate, 1998
• Giving Up the Ghost (A Memoir): Fourth Estate, 2003
• Learning to Talk (Short Stories): Fourth Estate, 2003
• Beyond Black: Fourth Estate, 2005
• Wolf Hall: Fourth Estate, 2009
• Bring Up the Bodies: Henry Holt and Co., First Edition, May 2012
• The Mirror and the Light: in progress

Prizes and awards

• 1987, Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize
• 1990, Southern Arts Literature Prize (Fludd)
• 1990, Cheltenham Prize (Fludd)
• 1990, Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize (Fludd)
• 1992, Sunday Express Book of the Year (A Place of Greater Safety)
• 1996, Hawthornden Prize (An Experiment in Love)
• 2003, MIND Book of the Year (Giving Up the Ghost (A Memoir))
• 2006, Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) (shortlist) (Beyond Black)
• 2006, CBE
• 2006, Orange Prize for Fiction (shortlist) (Beyond Black)
• 2009, Man Booker Prize (winner) (Wolf Hall), National Book Critics Circle Award (winner) (Wolf Hall)
• 2010, Orange Prize for Fiction (shortlist) (Wolf Hall)
• 2010, Walter Scott Prize (winner) (Wolf Hall)

External links

• Online Wall Street Journal review
• Enhanced Editions iPhone App of Wolf Hall
• Interview with Ramona Koval, The Book Show, ABC Radio National, 21.10.08
• Profile in The New Yorker magazine
• Mantel archive from The New York Review of Books
• Hilary Mantel goes from Booker outsider to favourite in 48 hours
• Cromwell Unshadowed, Razor Sharp, Janet Maslin, The New York Times, 4 October 2009
• Hilary Mantel on Wolf Hall Video
• Articles by Hilary Mantel on her publisher's blog, 5th Estate