Today is the birthday of the British author Dame Hilary Mantel, born Hilary Thompson in Derbyshire in 1952. She came from a working-class Catholic family and went to convent schools. When she went to college, she studied law, and married a geologist. She and her husband lived in Botswana for five years, and then moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where they lived for four years.
She already had several novels, a memoir, and a story collection under her belt when she published Wolf Hall in 2009, a richly detailed historical novel about the life of Thomas Cromwell, who was an advisor to Henry VIII.
She won the Man Booker Prize for fiction for Wolf Hall, and made history when she won the prize again for the book’s sequel, Bring Up the Bodies in 2012. She was the first woman — and the first English writer — to be awarded the Man Booker Prize twice. She’s also the only author to win it for back-to-back novels. One of the judges called her “the greatest living English prose writer.”
The latest in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, was published in March.
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