Dame Hilary Mantel, a Booker Prize-winning author of the Wolf Hall trilogy, has passed away at the age of 70.
Today, September 23, her literary agent 4th Estate Books announced the news on Twitter.
“We are heartbroken at the death of our beloved author, Dame Hilary Mantel, and our thoughts are with her friends and family, especially her husband, Gerald. This is a devastating loss and we can only be grateful she left us with such a magnificent body of work,” the tweet reads.
Dame Hilary was best known for her historical trilogy Wolf Hall, which was based on the life of Thomas Cromwell and later adapted for television and turned into a successful West End production.
With Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which also took home the 2012 Costa Book of the Year award, Dame Hilary won the Man Booker Prize twice.
The conclusion of her revolutionary The Mirror and the Light, the final book in the Wolf Hall Trilogy, was released in 2020 to rave reviews. It quickly rose to the top of the fiction bestseller list, and it was also longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, which she had previously won for Wolf Hall.
According to HarperCollins, the trilogy, which follows Thomas Cromwell’s ascent and fall in the court of King Henry VIII, has been translated into 41 languages and has sold more than five million copies worldwide.
Later, it was adapted for the stage and the big screen. In 2013, the Royal Shakespeare Company performed the first two novels, and in 2021, Dame Hilary’s The Mirror & the Light was played in London with Ben Miles as Cromwell.
The story was also turned into a TV series by the BBC, which debuted on BBC Two in 2015 and starred Sir Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell. The series went on to win three Bafta awards and a Golden Globe.
Tributes have come in for the author following the announcement of her death.
Booker Prize-winning…
