Bring up the
Bodies
wins
the 2012 Man
Booker Prize
Second
triumph for Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel is tonight named the winner of the
£50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her novel Bring up the Bodies,
published by Fourth Estate.
Hilary Mantel is the first woman and the first
British author to win the prize twice. At 60, she is only the third double
winner alongside J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey. She is also the first person to
win the prize for two novels in a trilogy, following her success in 2009 with Wolf
Hall.
Hilary was previously longlisted in 2005 for Beyond
Black. She was also a judge for the prize in 1990 when A.S. Byatt won with Possession.
Bring up the Bodies
is the second
win for Fourth Estate, following the success of Wolf Hall. The second
book in Mantel’s trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell, Bring up the
Bodies charts the bloody downfall of Anne Boleyn. Mantel has been widely
praised for her rich ‘descriptive intimacy’ (Telegraph), ‘novelistic
intelligence’ (New Yorker) and ability to transport the reader to the
fifteenth century. Margaret Atwood praised her in The Guardian, saying
‘literary invention does not fail her: she's as deft and verbally adroit as
ever’, whilst the judges admired Mantel's ‘even greater mastery of method, her
powerful realism in the separateness of past and present - and the vivid
depiction of English character and landscape’.
Sir Peter Stothard, Chair of judges, made the
announcement at the awards dinner which was televised live by the BBC from
London’s Guildhall. Mantel was presented with a cheque for £50,000 by
Peter Clarke, Chief Executive of Man.
Sir Peter comments: ‘This double accolade is
uniquely deserved. Hilary Mantel has rewritten the rules for historical
fiction. In Bring up the Bodies, our greatest modern writer retells the
origins of modern England.’
Winning the prize in 2009 brought Hilary Mantel
worldwide recognition and record sales; winning the prize this year will mean a further
considerable increase. In addition to her £50,000 prize, she was also given, along with
the rest of the 2012 shortlist, £2,500 and a specially
commissioned handbound edition of her book.
Stothard was joined on the 2012 judging panel
by: Dinah Birch, academic and literary critic; Amanda Foreman,
historian, writer and broadcaster; Dan Stevens, actor; and Bharat Tandon, academic, writer and reviewer.
This year’s shortlist has been widely acclaimed. With the judging panel’s emphasis on the
role of the novelist in renewing the English language, the media has
celebrated the ‘return of the literary novel’ with the Man Booker Prize.
The Winner
By Hilary
Mantel
Published by Fourth
Estate (£20)
The year is 1535 and
Thomas Cromwell, chief Minister to Henry VIII, must work both to please the
king and keep the nation safe. Anne Boleyn, for whose sake Henry has broken
with Rome and created his own church, has failed to do what she promised: bear
a son to secure the Tudor line. As Henry develops a dangerous attraction to
Wolf Hall’s Jane Seymour, Thomas must negotiate a ‘truth’ that will satisfy
Henry and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge
undamaged from the bloody theatre of Anne’s final days.
A former winner of
the Man Booker Prize (2009), Hilary Mantel CBE was born in Derbyshire, England
on 6 July 1952. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield
University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five
years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in
the mid-1980s. Her books include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988); Fludd
(1989) winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and
the Southern Arts Literature Prize; A Place of Greater Safety (1992),
winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year award; A Change of
Climate (1994); An Experiment in Love (1995), winner of the 1996
Hawthornden Prize; Beyond Black (2005), shortlisted for a 2006
Commonwealth Writers Prize and for the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and
longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and Wolf Hall (2009), winner of the
Man Booker Prize. In 2006 she was also awarded a CBE.
2 comments:
She is so incredibly good that she fully deserves it!
I agree. I recently read Beyond Black and thought it was an extraordinary book, profoundly original and remarkably skilfully written. I haven't had time to read Wolf Hall yet let alone Bring Up the Bodies but I'm looking forward to them.
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