Hilary Mantel, a British author best known for her Wolf Hall trilogy, a series of bestselling novels set amid the political turmoil of 16th-century England, for which she twice won the Man Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, has died aged 70.
Mantel had written critically praised historical and contemporary novels to little commercial notice before she became a literary phenomenon in 2009 with Wolf Hall and two subsequent novels, Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020). The books, based on the life of Thomas Cromwell, a key minister to King Henry VIII, were set in an epoch awash with royal intrigue, religious upheaval, ruthless political machination and the brutal treatment of women.
