Hilary Mantel, a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories attended the University of Sheffield and graduated as a Bachelor of Jurisprudence in 1973.
This was after she was transferred from the London School of Economics where she was reading law.
After university, Mantel worked in the social work department of a geriatric hospital and then as a sales assistant in a department store.
Mantel’s first novel, Every Day is Mother’s Day, was published in 1985, and its sequel, Vacant Possession, a year later.
After returning to England, she became the film critic of The Spectator, a position she held from 1987 to 1991, and a reviewer for a number of papers and magazines in Britain and the United States.
Her novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), which drew on her life in Saudi Arabia, uses a threatening clash of values between the neighbours in a city apartment block to explore the tensions between Islamic culture and the liberal West.
Her Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize-winning novel Fludd is set in 1956 in a fictitious northern village called Fetherhoughton, centring on a Roman Catholic church and a convent.
Sadly, Mantel died on Sept. 22 at age 70 after suffering stroke three days earlier.
