Mantel makes it Booker No2 with dark Tudor sequel
HILARY Mantel has become the first woman ever to win the Booker Prize twice after scooping the accolade for her latest novel.
The author, 60, was awarded the £50,000 literary prize last night for her Tudor thriller Bring Up The Bodies, making her the first author to have won it for two novels written in succession.
The novel, which chronicles the dark world of Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII, is the sequel to Wolf Hall, which won the prize in 2009.
Miss Mantel was one of the bookies’ favourites to win this year’s Man Booker accolade and ahead of the prize-giving at London’s Guildhall, Sir Peter Stothard, chairman of the judging panel, insisted Bring Up The Bodies won on merit.
He said: ‘This is a unique accolade. This is something that no other woman has done before. This is an extraordinary book in its own right.
‘It’s about novels, not novelists. It’s about texts, not reputations.
‘This prize was set up for books that will be around for decades to come. They are texts that will live on because each time you read them it’s a different text.’
The accolade is likely to set sales of her latest novel soaring, as they did in
‘This is a bloody story of Anne Boleyn’
2009 when Wolf Hall sold more than 200,000 copies in Britain and nearly half a million in the United States.
Bring Up The Bodies tells the story of Anne Boleyn’s downfall through Cromwell’s eyes.
The judges, which included Downton Abbey heartthrob Dan Stevens, chose it unanimously after deliberating for two hours and 16 minutes.
Sir Peter added: ‘This is a very remarkable piece of prose that transcends the work already written by a great English prose writer. This is a bloody story of Anne Boleyn. Mantel is a writer who thinks through blood. She uses her art, her power of prose, to create moral ambiguity and the real uncertainty of political life – then and now.’
Miss Mantel, from Glossop, Derbyshire, studied law and worked as a social worker before becoming a novelist – with Bring Up The Bodies being her 11th novel.
She beat fellow shortlisted authors Tan Twan Eng, Deborah Levy, Alison Moore, Will Self and Jeet Thayil. The shortlist was selected from an initial list of 145 titles – all of which the judges had to read in the space of a year.
The Booker Prize, set up in 1969, is awarded each year to the best full- length English language novel. The only other authors to have won the Booker twice are Peter Carey, an Australian, and South African-born J.M. Coetzee, which by some counts makes Miss Mantel the first British author to achieve the feat.
However, others count another British author, JG Farrell, in the list. Farrell won the prize in 1973 but in 2010 he was posthumously awarded a second Booker for his 1970 book Troubles. The award was known as the ‘lost’ Booker Prize because a change in the timing for books to be eligible in that year meant that 12 months’ worth of novels missed out on the chance to compete.