Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon said: “It is impossible to overstate the significance of the literary legacy Hilary Mantel leaves behind. Her brilliant Wolf Hall trilogy was the crowning achievement in an outstanding body of work. Rest in peace.” When asked by the Financial Times earlier this month whether she believed in an afterlife, Mantel said she did, but that she could not imagine how it might work. “However, the universe is not limited by what I can imagine,” she said. Ben Miles is an actor whose association with Thomas Cromwell began in 2013, playing him in the stage adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. In 2020, he co-wrote the stage adaptation of The Mirror And The Light with Hilary Mantel, appearing again as Cromwell in the play the following year.

The Wolf Hall Picture Book – HarperCollins Publishers UK

Bill Hamilton, who was Mantel’s agent throughout her career, said it had been “the greatest privilege” to work with the writer. “Her wit, stylistic daring, creative ambition and phenomenal historical insight mark her out as one of the greatest novelists of our time.” At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Zola said, ‘’In my view you cannot claim to have really seen something till you have photographed it.’’ The act of photographing, at least for a moment, distinguishes its object and estranges it from its context . . . Every stroke of the pen releases a thousand pictures inside the writer’s head. This book has made some of them visible.’ Hilary MantelIn 1990 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 she was awarded a CBE and in 2014 a DBE. The first half of the novel, built around Wolsey's fall from power, details Cromwell's domestic setup at Austin Friars and introduces the major players in Tudor politics. Without clobbering the reader with the weight of her research, Mantel works up a 16th-century world in which only a joker would call for cherries in April or lettuce in December, and where hearing an unlicensed preacher is an illicit thrill on a par with risking syphilis. The civil wars that brought the Tudors to the throne still make older people shudder, bringing Henry's obsession with producing a male heir into focus. And the precarious nature of early modern life is brought home by the abrupt deaths of Cromwell's wife and daughters, carried off by successive epidemics in moving but unsentimentally staged scenes. Cromwell asks if he can bury his elder daughter with a copybook she's written her name in; "the priest says he has never heard of such a thing". For all its structural and thematic importance, however, Cromwell's conflict with More is only part of a wider battle caused by Henry's desire to have his first marriage annulled. Much space is given over to court politics, which Mantel manages to make comprehensible without downplaying its considerable complexity. Central figures - the Boleyn sisters, Catherine of Aragon, the young Mary Tudor, the king himself - are brought plausibly to life, as are Cromwell's wife, Liz Wykys, and Cardinal Wolsey. Determined, controlled but occasionally impulsive, and a talented hater, Mantel's Anne Boleyn is a more formidable character even than her uncle the Duke of Norfolk, portrayed here as a scheming old warhorse who rattles a bit when he moves on account of all the relics and holy medals concealed about his person. Published: 3 Mar 2020 After Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, which other historical figures deserve a fictional revision? Find the hottest teen books, connect with your favorite YA authors and meet new friends who share your reading interests!

‘I’m against parallels’: Hilary Mantel is wary of drawing

Among other things, it is an interrogation of the way we interact with history; of the gaps in the record; its elusive nature; and its unexpected resonances with our contemporary lives. George Miles sent her a dummy book after he had collected a critical mass of photographs. “I remember saying, ‘we have to do something with these’, Mantel says. “But I had no idea what, at the time, or that it would be such an odyssey, marching on at the same time as the books.”.La librairie sera fermée le 1er novembre pour cause de jour férié. Les activités reprendront le lendemain.

The Wolf Hall Picture Book by Mantel, Hilary 0008530343 - The Wolf Hall Picture Book by Mantel, Hilary

To date the Wolf Hall trilogy has sold more than five million copies worldwide and has been translated into 41 languages. Earlier this month HarperCollins published The Wolf Hall Picture Book, a photography book by Mantel and co-authors Ben Miles and George Miles. As well as supremely talented, Mantel was also “a joy to work with”, Pearson said. “Only last month I sat with her on a sunny afternoon in Devon, while she talked excitedly about the new novel she had embarked on. That we won’t have the pleasure of any more of her words is unbearable. What we do have is a body of work that will be read for generations. We must be grateful for that.”

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Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire on 6 July 1952. She studied law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University, and went on to become a social work assistant in a geriatric hospital. Mantel married the geologist Gerald McEwan in 1972. The couple divorced in 1981 but remarried in 1982. In 1974, she began writing a novel about the French Revolution, which was published in 1992 as A Place of Greater Safety. In 1977, Mantel and her husband moved to Botswana, living there for five years. Later, they spent four years in Saudi Arabia, returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. Hilary Mantel with Ben Miles (centre), an actor, and his brother, George, a photographer, with whom she collaborated to create The Wolf Hall Picture Book. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian