When the judges for the 1992 Booker Prize received Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, an 800-page novel set during the French Revolution seemed a quirky diversion from the work of a novelist then most associated with shortish dark comedies of contemporary or recent life, such as Fludd (1989), featuring a weird Catholic priest, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), in which an Englishwoman suffers Saudi Arabian culture shock. We did not shortlist the book. History shows that monumental distant-historical fiction would subsequently become the glorious core of Mantel’s work, though, perhaps validating our doubts, featuring English, rather than French, revolutionary struggles.
Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies (2012) — viewing the marital and political manoeuvres of King Henry VIII through the eyes of his strategically protean chief advisor, Thomas Cromwell — made Mantel the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice for successive novels.
