It’s the birthday of novelist Dame Hilary Mary Mantel (b. 1952), best known for her meticulously researched and masterfully written Man Booker-winning novels Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), about Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII; she is currently writing the third novel in the series. Wolf Hall has been selected as one of five finalists out of 51 past Man Booker winners for a Golden Man Booker award to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the award. The winner will be announced July 8th at the Man Booker 50 Festival. THAT’S IN TWO DAYS, PEOPLE. […reaching through the computer to shake you by the shoulders…]

Mantel was born in Hadfield, Derbyshire, England. She studied law at the London School of Economics and the University of Sheffield (1973), worked briefly as a social worker and a store assistant, and then moved with her husband to Botswana for five years and Saudi Arabia for four. During this time, Mantel began writing, in part because her problems with endometriosis did not allow her to be active. Her first novel was Every Day Is Mother’s Day (1985), about a woman and her autistic daughter, followed by a sequel, Vacant Possession (1986), and a number of novels ranging from a political thriller set in Jeddah (Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, 1988) to an account of the French Revolution (A Place of Greater Safety, 1992) to a coming-of-age novel (An Experiment in Love, 1995). All this time her novels were winning prizes and acclaim, but it was the publication of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies that made Mantel Really Truly Seriously Famous.

NB: Mantel never commits the literary crime of many historical novelists, which is to impose modern sensibilities on her characters in order to make them more palatable (but ultimately less real) to contemporary readers. Yet her characters are flesh-and-blood real and relatable. About novel writing, Mantel has said: “In time I understood one thing – that you don’t become a novelist to become a spinner of entertaining lies: you become a novelist so you can tell the truth. I start to practise my trade at the point where the satisfactions of the official story break down.” (See more on this here.)

Have a fine summer day and stay scrupulously honest to the data.