Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel was a British novelist who won the Man Booker Prize twice for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, her extraordinary reimagining of Thomas Cromwell's rise through Henry VIII's court.

Hilary Mantel spent decades as one of Britain’s most admired novelists before Wolf Hall — published in 2009 — brought her to the broadest possible readership and won her the first of two Man Booker Prizes. The novel resurrects Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s fixer and enforcer, as one of the most psychologically complex protagonists in historical fiction. Mantel’s Cromwell is not the villain of traditional Tudor narrative but a man of formidable intelligence and ambition, shaped by a brutal childhood, who navigates the murderous politics of the English Reformation with a pragmatic ruthlessness that the novel renders as comprehensible if not sympathetic.

The formal innovation of the trilogy — Mantel uses the present tense and a distinctive third-person voice in which “he” almost always refers to Cromwell — creates an intimacy and immediacy entirely unusual in historical fiction. Bring Up the Bodies, which follows the fall of Anne Boleyn, is the trilogy’s most compressed and devastating volume: the same Cromwell who served Henry so effectively now engineers the destruction of a woman the king has tired of, and the gap between the political necessity and the human cost is rendered with ice-cold clarity.

Mantel’s prose requires full attention — the present-tense narration and the “he said/he did” construction can initially disorient readers accustomed to conventional historical fiction — and the world she depicts demands at least a passing familiarity with Tudor history. But for readers willing to meet the novels on their own terms, the Wolf Hall trilogy represents a summit of the historical fiction form: intelligent, morally serious, and unmistakably the work of a great novelist.