Hilary Mary
Mantel is an English novelist,
short story writer, essayist and critic. She was born on 6 July 1952. She has an incredible style of writing. 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. Her latest book, Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment of the Thomas Cromwell
Trilogy, won the 2012 Man Booker Prize. She is the first woman to receive the award
twice.
Hilary Mary Thompson was born
in Glossop, Derbyshire, the eldest of three children, and
was brought up in the mill
village of Hadfield. She has explored her family background, the mainspring of much of
her fiction, in her memoir, Giving
Up the Ghost (2003). She
attended Harry town Convent in Romiley, Cheshire. 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.
After university, Mantel
worked in the social work department of a geriatric hospital, and then as a sales assistant in a
department store. In 1972, she married Gerald McEwen, a geologist. 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. Later they spent four years in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She published a memoir of this time, Someone to Disturb, in the London Review of Books.
Her first novel, Every Day is Mother's Day, was published in 1985, and its sequel, Vacant Possession, a year later. Her novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), which drew on her first-hand experience
in Saudi Arabia, uses a threatening clash of values between the neighbors in a
city apartment block to explore the tensions between Islamist culture and the
liberal West. Her Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize-winning novel Fludd is set in 1956 in a fictitious northern village
called Fetherhoughton, centering on a Roman Catholic Church and a convent. 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 Change of Climate (1994), set in rural Norfolk, explores the lives of Ralph and Anna Eldred, as
they raise their four children and devote their lives to charity. An
Experiment in Love, which won the Hawthornden
Prize, takes place over two
university terms in 1970. It follows the progress of three girls – two friends
and one enemy – as they leave home and attend university in London. 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. 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 as fiction. Her 2005 novel, Beyond
Black, was shortlisted for the Orange
Prize. Set in the years around
the second millennium, it features a professional medium,
Alison Hart, whose calm and jolly exterior conceals grotesque psychic damage.
The long novel Wolf Hall,
about Henry VIII's
minister Thomas
Cromwell, was published in 2009 to
high critical acclaim. The book won that year's Man
Booker Prize.
The sequel to Wolf Hall, called Bring Up the Bodies, was published in May 2012 to wide acclaim. It
won the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Mantel
is working on the third novel of the Thomas Cromwell 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.
Article By: Sayooj Samuel
VIII-A
S4617
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