Hilary Mantel wins second Booker Prize

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British writer Hilary Mantel won the prestigious Booker literary prize for a second time on Tuesday with her blood-soaked Tudor saga Bring Up the Bodies, which the head of the judging panel said had “rewritten the book” on historical fiction.

Mantel, who took the $82,000 award in 2009 for Wolf Hall, is the first British author, and the first woman, to achieve a Booker double.

“Bring Up the Bodies” is also the first sequel to win the prize. It and Wolf Hall are parts of a planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, the powerful and ambiguous chief minister to King Henry VIII.

“You wait 20 years for a Booker Prize, and two come along at once,” Mantel said as she accepted the award at London’s medieval Guildhall. “I regard this as an act of faith and a vote of confidence.”

Alternately thoughtful and thuggish, trying to keep his head in a treacherous world, Mantel’s Cromwell has drawn comparisons to the Mafia don at the centre of the “Godfather” saga, and Mantel’s novel combines finely wrought prose with thriller touches.

“You can see as much Don Corleone in this book as D.H. Lawrence,” said Times Literary Supplement editor Peter Stothard, who chaired the Booker judging panel.

“This is a bloody story,” he said. “But Hilary Mantel is a writer who thinks through the blood. She uses her art, her power of prose, to create moral ambiguity.”

Bring Up the Bodies traces the intertwined fates of Cromwell and the monarch’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, who fell from favour when she failed to produce a male heir.

Stothard said the new book “utterly surpassed” the earlier novel, breathing new life into a well-known story. Henry VIII’s reign has inspired many fictional treatments, from the acclaimed play and film A Man for All Seasons to the soapy TV series The Tudors.

Stothard said Bring Up the Bodies showed “the greatest modern English prose writer reviving possibly one of the best-known pieces of English history.”

“This is all well-trodden territory with an inevitable outcome, and yet she is able to bring it to life as though for the first time,” he said.

“She has rewritten the book on writing historical fiction.”

The judging panel, which included Downton Abbey actor Dan Stevens, met for just over two hours on Tuesday to pick its winner.

Stothard was delighted Mantel is now getting her due.

“Many writers have put more effort into propelling their own reputations than Hilary Mantel has,” he said.

Mantel joins Peter Carey of Australia and J.M. Coetzee of South Africa as a two-time winner of the prize, which is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies.

Mantel beat five other shortlisted books to take the Booker. She had been the bookies’ favourite, although Britain’s Will Self was also considered a strong contender for the century-spanning stream of consciousness Umbrella, a novel about a woman with encephalitis.

India’s Jeet Thayil was nominated for his first novel, Narcopolis, set among heroin addicts in 1970s and 80s Mumbai, and Britain’s Alison Moore for The Lighthouse, about a middle-aged man’s life-changing ferry trip to Germany.

The other finalists were Malaysia’s Tan Twan Eng for The Garden of Evening Mists, which centres on a survivor of a World War II Japanese prison camp; and South Africa-born Briton Deborah Levy for Swimming Home, a portrait of the devastation wreaked by depression.