The great British writer Hilary Mantel, a two-time laureate of the prestigious Man Booker Prize - for the first two books in the famous trilogy, "Wolf's Den" and "Corpse on View", has passed away. The last part of the series, "The Mirror and the Light", was published in March 2020, and the author was the first woman to win the Booker Prize twice.
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"We are deeply moved by the death of our beloved author, Hilary Mantel, and our thoughts are with her friends and family, especially her husband, Gerald," said a statement from 4th Estate Books.
"It is a great loss and we can only be grateful that she left us such a magnificent body of work. Trilogy Wolf Hall, according to which the BBC broadcast the series, described the fate of Thomas Cromwell and his spectacular rise from the streets of London to the chief minister of King Henry VIII", reports Reuters.
Her Croatian publisher VBZ announced about the book "Wolf's Lair": "Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel is an exciting, dynamic, masterfully written historical novel set in Tudor England, during the reign of the controversial King Henry VIII." Bringing at the same time, through the fictional biography of the statesman Thomas Cromwell, the first Earl of Essex, a strong and captivating bildungs-narrative, a detailed account of court intrigues as well as the everyday life of the broad classes and an impressively sketched framework of the "great", political history of Europe at the time, Wolf Hall is probably the most complete , the ultimate novel of the era; the best proof that the genre is still very much alive, contemporary and exciting. England in the first half of the sixteenth century is a country of high culture and great Renaissance minds, but also a country shaken by wars, diseases and political turmoil, and a religious schism is approaching: because of Henry's unconventional marriage policy, the English Church is separating from Rome, and there are threats of serious foreign policy consequences. Master Cromwell, once a blacksmith's son, pulls all the strings; closely supervises the king's romances. It is impossible to predict where his scheming on behalf of England will lead the kingdom, as well as the reader…”
Hilary Mantel was born in Derbyshire in 1952 and studied law at the London School of Economics and the University of Sheffield. She worked as a social worker and lived in Botswana and Saudi Arabia, before returning to the UK in the mid-1980s. She married geologist Gerald McEwen in 1972. The couple later divorced, but soon remarried.
After Brexit was implemented, the writer - who was of Irish descent according to her grandparents - decided to apply for Irish citizenship, justifying her act by saying that she wanted to "become a European again".
She considered the proponents of Brexit to be "immature, hypocritical, insidious and often ridiculous opportunists". She also criticized the British monarchy. She wrote a total of 17 books, including non-fiction works.
Nova reports that "almost every one of this writer's novels has been awarded, and two novels have been crowned with the Booker Prize - "Wolf's Litter" and "Corpse in View".
The final installment of her ground-breaking trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, met with huge critical acclaim, becoming an instant Sunday Times bestseller and shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
This is what Art's collaborator, writer and critic Vujica Ognjenović recently wrote about the final novel of the trilogy: "In this sequel, the author finally has to kill Cromwell, who was Henry's right-hand man for almost ten years; In 1540, the king lost patience with his loyal servant after a disastrous match with his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, and beheaded him.
It is an interesting fact that each of the books of Cromwell's trilogy ends with the beheading. Thomas More was executed in "Wolf's Litter", Anna Bohlen in the novel "Corpse in View". About the difference in writing about the beheading of Cromwell at the end of the novel "Mirrors and Light" from describing the execution of Anne Boleyn and Thomas More, the author pointed out that this difference is reflected in the fact that she had to describe the state of Cromwell's consciousness until he lost it. So she had to find a way to stay in his head until all his senses shut down, until he stopped hearing, feeling and seeing. "It seems as if he feels a blade going through his neck," Hilary Mantel explained in an interview. “Yes, he is still conscious. There is some kind of tradition that Cromwell's beheading took quite a long time. But there is no modern evidence for that. However, about a generation later Tom Fox said in The Book of Martyrs that the beheading was done by someone who was not fit to do the job."
Her publisher Harper Collins confirmed that she died "suddenly but peacefully" on Thursday, surrounded by close family and friends.
Ben Hamilton, who was Mantel's agent throughout her career, said it was the "greatest privilege" to work with the writer.
"Her wit, stylistic boldness, creative ambition and phenomenal historical insight mark her as one of the greatest novelists of our time."
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