Toby Clements, a Costa judge, reflects upon Hilary Mantel's overall win.
Hilary Mantel: Unstoppable?
The Telegraph 04 Feb 2013
As one of the judges for this year’s Costa Award for Fiction, I was faced
with a not wholly pleasurable quandary: should we award the prize to a
relatively unknown author and congratulate ourselves for giving flight to a new
writer’s career, or ought we just pack up early and award the prize to Hilary Mantel?
Less sprawling than Wolf Hall but just as all-encompassing, Bring Up the Bodies charts not just the
fall of Anne Boleyn and the counterbalancing rise of Jane Seymour in Henry VIIIs
affections, it also follows Cromwell’s revenge on five men for their mockery of
Cardinal Wolsey in a masque performed after his death.
Mantel has already won the Man Booker prize (twice, for Wolf Hall and its sequel) and Bring Up
the Bodies has sold 240,000 copies in hardback – more than eight times the
combined total of the other four category winners. Surely she hardly needs the
prize money, or the publicity? Even people who don’t read books know who she is.
As one of my fellow judges wondered aloud, just how much further up can those
bodies be brought?
Of course it is now a matter of historical record that not only did Hilary
Mantel win the Costa Award for Best Novel, she has now netted the overall award
– and in the end that is right, because not to have done so would have been
perverse. After all, encouraging the careers of fledgling authors is not the
business of most literary prizes. The standard of the other category winners was
high, but right now Hilary Mantel is like Rafa Nadal was in 2008, and however
well her opponents are playing, however much the literary equivalents of
Djokovic, or Murray or Federer raise their games, she is able to raise hers
higher, to come up with something daring to take the breath away and leave her
opponents flat-footed and rooted to the ground.
Full article
Full article
