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Hilary Mantel

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Author

The Resume

    (July 6, 1952-September 22, 2022)
    Born in Glossop, Derbyshire, England, United Kingdom
    Birth name was Hilary Mary Thompson
    Wrote three historical novels about Thomas Cromwell: ‘Wolf Hall’ (2009), ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ (2012) and ‘The Mirror & the Light’ (2020)
    Also wrote the novels ‘Every Day Is Mother’s Day’ (1985), ‘Vacant Possession’ (1986), ‘Eight Months on Ghazzah Street’ (1988), ‘Fludd’ (1989), ‘A Place of Greater Safety’ (1992), ‘A Change of Climate’ (1994), ‘An Experiment in Love’ (1995), ‘The Giant, O’Brien’ (1998), and ‘Beyond Black’ (2005)
    Wrote the memoir ‘Giving Up the Ghost’ (2003)
    Two-time winner of the Booker Prize for best original English-language novel (2009, 2012)
    Named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature (2014)

Why she might be annoying:

    She had a temporary addiction to barbiturates. (She jokes that she replaced it with an addiction to semicolons.)
    She divorced, then remarried geologist Gerald McEwan.
    She said about writing historical fiction: ‘I felt I was morally inferior to historians and artistically inferior to real novelists, who could do plots.’
    She fantasized about murdering Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and eventually wrote a short story about it.
    She gave a collection of her essays the punning title ‘Mantelpieces.’

Why she might not be annoying:

    Her parents’ marriage broke up when she was eleven and she never saw her father again.
    She suffered severe endometriosis (which was misdiagnosed for years; one psychiatrist suggested her symptoms stemmed from being overly ambitious) and had to undergo a hysterectomy when she was 27.
    She was a film critic for The Spectator (1987-91).
    She was the fourth author (after J.G. Farrell, Peter Carey and J.M. Coetzee) and first woman to win the Booker Prize twice.
    She was a fan of Game of Thrones: ‘It might be fantasy, but it's a lot more like real history than some [historical] novels.’

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 2 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 65 Votes: 46.15% Annoying