Dame Hilary Mary Mantel DBE FRSL (/mænˈtɛl/ man-TEL;[4] born Thompson; 6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022) was a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories.

Mantel won the Booker Prize twice: the first was for her 2009 novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, and the second was for its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies.

Her parents, Margaret (née Foster) and Henry Thompson (a clerk), were both Catholics of Irish descent, born in England.

[16] In 1974, she began writing a novel about the French Revolution, but was unable to find a publisher (it was eventually released as A Place of Greater Safety in 1992).

After returning to England, she became the film critic of The Spectator, a position she held from 1987 to 1991,[23] and a reviewer for a number of papers and magazines in Britain and the United States.

It features a threatening clash of values between the neighbours in a city apartment block to explore the tensions between Islamic culture and the liberal West.

[24][25][26] Her Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize-winning novel Fludd (1989) is set in 1956 in a fictitious northern village called Fetherhoughton, centering on a Roman Catholic church and a convent.

This large-scale historical novel, informed by scholarly knowledge, traces the career of three French revolutionaries, Danton, Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, from childhood to their early deaths during the Reign of Terror of 1794.

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.

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.

[34] Set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it features a professional medium, Alison Hart, whose calm and jolly exterior conceals grotesque psychic damage.

[36][37] The book won that year's Booker Prize and, upon winning the award, Mantel said, "I can tell you at this moment I am happily flying through the air".

[51] The New York Times described the collection as having "narrators much more outwardly meek and inwardly turbulent than the murderous royals and puppeteers so beloved in her historical fiction".

[52] The controversial title story is about an assassin who disguises himself as a plumber and takes over an apartment opposite the hospital where the Prime Minister is undergoing eye surgery.

She was also working on a short non-fiction book, titled The Woman Who Died of Robespierre, about the Polish playwright Stanisława Przybyszewska.

[56] In December 2016, Mantel spoke with The Kenyon Review editor David H. Lynn on the KR Podcast[57] about the way historical novels are published, what it is like to live in the world of one character for more than ten years, writing for the stage, and the final book in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror & the Light.

She was initially diagnosed with a psychiatric illness, hospitalised, and treated with antipsychotic drugs, which reportedly produced psychotic symptoms.

Finally, in Botswana and desperate, she consulted a medical textbook and realised she was probably suffering from a severe form of endometriosis, a diagnosis confirmed by doctors in London.

The condition, and what was considered at the time to be a necessary treatment – a surgical menopause at the age of 27, left her unable to have children and continued to disrupt her life.

[68][69] Mantel expanded on these views in an essay, "Royal Bodies", for the London Review of Books (LRB): "It may be that the whole phenomenon of monarchy is irrational, but that doesn't mean that when we look at it we should behave like spectators at Bedlam.

Brought up as a Roman Catholic, she ceased to believe at age 12, but said the religion left a permanent mark on her: 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.

"[8] These statements, as well as the themes explored in her earlier novel Fludd, led the Catholic bishop Mark O'Toole to comment: "There is an anti-Catholic thread there, there is no doubt about it.