Hilary Mantel, the British author who twice won the Booker Prize has died. She died Sept. 22 at age 70.
Mantel’s first Booker Prize was for the 2009 novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, and the second was for its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies.
Born in Derbyshire in 1952, Mantel studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University.
She worked as a social worker and lived in Botswana and Saudi Arabia before returning to the UK in the mid-1980s.
She was a film critic for the British cultural affairs magazine the Spectator from 1987 to 1991 and published her first novel, “Every Day is Mother’s Day,” in 1985.
But it wasn’t until the publication of her 10th novel, “Wolf Hall,” in 2009 that Mantel became a household name.
Set in Tudor England and centered on the life and times of statesman and chief minister to Henry VIII Thomas Cromwell, “Wolf Hall” won the 2009 Booker Prize.
Three years later, Mantel’s sequel, “Bring Up the Bodies,” took the prize again.
“You wait 20 years for a Booker prize and then two come along at once,” the author mused as she received the award, according to the Guardian.
In 2014, she received a damehood for her services to literature.
