Friday, February 22, 2013

Mantel to receive Bodley Medal


21.02.13 | Joshua Farrington - The Bookseller

Hilary Mantel will be awarded the Bodley Medal at the Oxford Literary Festival, with the announcement coming as controversy continues over her lecture on royalty.
The double Man Booker Prize-winning novelist will be given the award, which marks outstanding achievement in literature, at the festival next month, the BBC reports.
Discussion of Mantel's comments in a speech later printed in the London Review of Books, which referred to Catherine Middleton's "plastic smile", continues in the papers today (21st February).

 In the Daily Mail, which originally put the story on their front page alongside the Metro, diarist Richard Kay has targeted another aspect of Mantel's speech, where she revealed she had been so overwhelmed when invited to Buckingham Palace, she sat on the floor to recover. Kay said: "the controversial novelist . . . who was invited to the Palace before her injudicious attack on the Duchess of Cambridge . . . clearly did not care to discover the proper procedure for behaviour in the royal presence."

 The Guardian collected previous controversies kick-started by pieces in the LRB, including by Mary Beard and Anne Enright. Meanwhile, Tom Peck in the Independent took a more lighthearted view, and focussed on Mantel's comparison of the Royal Family to pandas.
HarperCollins, which publishes Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, revealed yesterday that e-book sales for Wolf Hall had doubled the day after the story broke.

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