Hilary Mantel on winning the 2009 Man Booker prize


Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is the most talked-about book of the year and the fastest-selling Booker winner ever. As the 2010 shortlist is unveiled, the author recalls her moment of glory, and reveals how it changed her life.
By Hilary Mantel - Published: The Telegraph, 07 Sep 2010

In 1994 I brought out a novel called A Change of Climate, which was shortlisted for a small prize given to books with a religious theme. It was the first time a novel had got so far with the judges and I was surprised to be in contention. The main characters in my book were Christian missionaries. The winner was to be announced at a low-key gathering at an old-fashioned publishing house near the British Museum.


I had never been to a literary party that was anything like this. Some of the invitees seemed to be taking, with shy simpers, their first alcoholic drink of the year. Conversation was a struggle; all we had in common was God. After I didn’t win, I came out into the fine light evening and hailed a cab. What I felt was the usual flatness after a wasted journey; I told myself I hadn’t really expected to win this one. But as we inched through the traffic, a reaction set in. I was swept, I was possessed, by an urge to do something wicked: something truly odious, something that would reveal me as a mistress of moral turpitude and utterly disqualify me from ever being shortlisted for that prize again.

But what can you do, by yourself, in the back of a taxi on the way to Waterloo? Wishing to drain the chalice of evil to the dregs, I found myself out of ideas. I could possibly lean out of the window and make hideous faces at pedestrians; but how would they know that it was my hideous face? They might think I was always like that.

For a week or so, after I won the 2009 Man Booker prize for fiction with Wolf Hall, people in the streets did recognise me. They’d seen my triumph face, my unpretending grin of delight stretched as wide as a carved pumpkin. Sometimes they would burble happily at me and squeeze my hand. On the train home one evening, a pale glowing woman with a Vermeer complexion, alighting prosaically at Woking, followed me through a carriage and whispered to me, leaving on my shoulder a ghost-touch of congratulation. All this was new to me. Before the Man Booker, I had trouble being recognised by a bookseller when I was standing next to a stack of my own books.

I am a veteran of shortlists. I have served my time in the enclosures where the also-rans cool down after the race, every back turned, the hot crowds sucked away as if by a giant magnet to where the winner basks in the camera-flash. I have sat through a five-hour presentation ceremony in Manchester, where the prize was carried off by Anthony Burgess, then a spindly, elderly figure, who looked down at me from his great height, a cheque between thumb and finger, and said: “I expect you need this more than me,” and there again I experienced a wicked but ungratified impulse, to snatch the cheque away and stuff it into my bra.
Her full piece at The Telegraph.