A beer brewing memoir set in CORNWALL
Little known facts about best-selling author Hilary Mantel
17th November 2019
Hilary Mary Thompson was born in Glossop, Derbyshire on July 6th, 1952. The eldest of three children, she grew up in the mill village of Hadfield, Derbyshire, where she went to a Roman Catholic primary school.
Her parents Margaret and Henry separated, and Hilary did not see her father again after the age of eleven. She and the family moved to Romiley in Cheshire with Jack Mantel, Hilary’s unofficial stepfather, and whose surname she took legally.
After attending Harrytown Convent School in Cheshire, Hilary studied law at the London School of Economics from 1970. She transferred to the University of Sheffield and graduated in 1973. Her first job after university was in the social work department of a geriatric hospital and then as a sales assistant at a department store.
In 1972, Hilary married a geologist, Gerald McEwen. They moved to Botswana in 1977 and later spent four years in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She later said that ‘leaving Jeddah felt like the happiest day of my life’.
Mantel’s first novel Every Day is Mother’s Day, was published in 1985 and its sequel, Vacant Possession, in 1986. After returning to England, she was the film critic of The Spectator from 1987 to 1991.
A Place of Greater Safety published in 1992, won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. It traces the careers of French revolutionaries Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins from childhood to the Reign of Terror, in a long and historically accurate fictional form that foreshadowed her greatest literary successes.
Other novels, short stories and her memoir followed, but it was Wolf Hall – a long novel about Thomas Cromwell published in 2009 – that brought huge acclaim and won that year’s Man Booker Prize. Hilary said she would spend the £50,000 prize on ‘sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’.
Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to Wolf Hall, was published in 2012 and again won the Man Booker Prize. She is currently working on her third novel about Thomas Cromwell, The Mirror and the Light.
During her earlier life, Hilary suffered from a debilitating illness. The initial diagnosis was something psychiatric. She was hospitalised and treated with antipsychotic drugs. Whilst living in Botswana she self-diagnosed the illness as a severe form of endometriosis, later confirmed by doctors in London. The condition left her unable to have children, and treatment by steroids caused weight gain and a significant change in her appearance.
The list of awards and honours for her literary career is too long to reproduce here.
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