Judges of the 'British Nobel' say it would be 'ludicrous' if the success of Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies prevented her from winning further literary prizes
Adding to her laurels ... the winner of
the 2013 David Cohen prize, Hilary Mantel. Photograph: Sarah Lee
Fresh from winning the Costa
prize and completing
a Booker double, Hilary Mantel this
evening added the award described as the "British Nobel" – the £40,000 David
Cohen – to her haul of prizes.
Chair of judges Mark Lawson stood ready to defend to the hilt the decision by judges to reward a novelist who has already enjoyed an extraordinary year. "It seems paradoxical that giving a major literary prize – the British Nobel prize, as I think of it – to one of the most generally-admired and well-liked people in the literary world will be, for some, controversial," he said. "This is because of a feeling – voiced by some pundits and perhaps secretly thought by authors who feel unrewarded – that Hilary Mantel has recently been given too much too quickly. That issue, however, was rapidly dismissed by the judges. It would be ludicrous if a history of high achievement somehow disbarred a writer from the David Cohen prize's list of the highest literary achievers."
Established in 1993, the
biennial David Cohen award celebrates an entire career, and has been won in the
past by Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney, VS Naipaul and Harold Pinter and, last
year, by Julian Barnes. Mantel's 28-year career is of a similar stature, with 13
books, including novels, short stories and memoir – as well as the two
historical blockbusters which have brought her fame and fortune in more recent
years, 2009's Booker-winning Wolf
Hall, and last year's sequel, Bring
Up the Bodies.
"There are some readers who think that I was born on the day Wolf Hall was published," said Mantel. "This prize acknowledges that there are no overnight sensations in the creative arts. That's not the way it works. The ground has to be prepared and I feel that this is recognition of the fact that for many many years I've been trying to perfect my craft."
In 1989, Mantel's clerical
novel Fludd,
set in a 1950s northern England town, won her the Winifred Holtby Memorial
prize, the Cheltenham prize and the Southern Arts Literature prize. A
Place of Greater Safety, set during the French revolution, took the Sunday
Express Book of the Year award, while her memoir, Giving
Up the Ghost (2003), was the MIND Book of the Year. In 2006 she was awarded
a CBE.
"Crucially, while [Mantel's] other recent prizes have been for two recent books, the David Cohen prize assesses and rewards an entire career to date. In the case of Hilary Mantel, this means 28 years of work that has produced 13 books ranging across historical and contemporary novels, short stories and a memoir," said Lawson, who was joined on the David Cohen judging panel by authors, critics and academics including Kathleen Jamie, Kate Summerscale and Sarah Hall.
"While the judges were as impressed as most readers by Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, it is our particular hope that this prize for three decades of dedication to the possibilities of narrative imagination and English prose will direct attention to such earlier works as the novels Fludd, A Change of Climate and Beyond Black and the autobiography Giving Up The Ghost," said Lawson. "Consideration of this remarkable career soon led us to feel that we had had enough of anyone who will moan that Hilary Mantel has already had enough prizes."
The novelist, who drew
controversy last month over misinterpreted
remarks about the Duchess of Cambridge, said she "did at first find it a
little bit hard to take in" when she heard she'd won the David Cohen. "My
husband gave me the news and I said 'Oh I think you mean I've been invited to
the David Cohen awards'." But she promised judges "that much as there is a
lifetime's worth of work behind me, there is still a lifetime's worth of work
still to come".
Part of Mantel's prize is
to choose the recipient of the Clarissa Luard award, a £12,500 award for a
literature organisation that supports young writers and readers or an individual
writer under the age of 35. Mantel picked Katie Ward, an author who she met in
2007 and whose first novel – Girl
Reading – she passed on to her agent. A bidding war ensued, and the book was
published in 2011 by Virago.
"Hilary is a very special person to me. Not only is she a brilliant and perceptive author, she is also a kind and generous mentor," said Ward. "Over the years, she's dedicated a great deal of time to supporting new writers. I for one will always be grateful for her guidance, friendship and belief. To be receiving the Clarissa Luard Award is lovely, and a little surreal. I take it as encouragement to keep writing. It means I can finish my second novel with confidence and begin to think ahead about what I want to tackle next."
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