Author of the week: Hilary Mantel

last updated 8 January 2015

It’s the prize so nice, Hilary Mantel has won it twice, said Anita Singh and Gaby Wood in The Telegraph (U.K.). The 60-year-old novelist and reigning master of historical fiction has just made history herself, becoming the first British writer to win Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Man Booker Prize, for a second time. In 2009, Mantel won for Wolf Hall. Last week, her Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume in a planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, took the award. Mantel said the latest honor left her “at a loss for words” but also mulling what comes next for the brilliant and brutish chief minister to King Henry VIII. “I go into the hardest thing I will ever have to do now, the third volume,” she says. “I feel an obligation to give it everything I’m capable of.”

The work of making historical fiction respectable has taken a personal toll on Mantel, said Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian (U.K.). “You do teeter on the edge all the time,” she says, speaking of her subject matter as a “dangerous” obsession. “What if you visited the 18th century and never came back?” Yet she’s persevered, through ill health and decades of chasing after her first major success. At the moment, like Cromwell, she’s on top. But in the trilogy’s third book, The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell must die. The details surrounding his death are hazy, she says, so she’s anxious to get back to writing. She likens the work to being a medium, opening herself to whatever comes next. “You talk to the dead one way or another, and you make it pay.”