Hilary Mantel is the author of eleven novels, a collection of short stories and a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. She writes both historical and contemporary fiction, and her settings range from a South African township under apartheid to Paris in the Revolution, from a city in twentieth-century Saudi Arabia to rural Ireland in the eighteenth century.
Her novel Wolf Hall is about Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII. It won the 2009 Man Booker Prize, the inaugural Walter Scott Prize, and in the US won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Bring Up the Bodies won the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award. Taken together Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have sold over three million copies and have been translated into thirty-six languages.
Hilary Mantel was made a Dame in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to literature.