Beyond Black (Paperback)

Hilary Mantel is an English author who has written short stories, essays, biographies and, most famously, historical fiction. She is one of only a few authors to have won the Man Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.

She was born in Glossop, Derbyshire and studied Law at the London School of Economics. She moved to Botswana in 1977 with her husband and later spent four years in Saudi Arabia. Her memoir of this period, Someone to Disturb, won The Spectator's inaugural Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize. She returned to England in the mid-1980s.

Before the success of Wolf Hall she had written nine successful books and regularly wrote for The Spectator and other magazines and newspapers.

In an interview published in The Guardian in 2014, Mantel confessed to fantasizing about the murdering of Margaret Thatcher in 1983, and fictionalized the event in a short story called The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. 

Book and writing awards

Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize 1990 (Fludd), Hawthornden Prize 1996 (An Experiment in Love), Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2009(Wolf Hall), Walter Scott Prize 2010 (Wolf Hall) and Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2012 (Bring Up the Bodies).

Similar authors to Hilary Mantel

Antonia Fraser, Margaret Forster and Peter Ackroyd.