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Hilary Mantel wins the Booker with Tudor novel
7 Oct 2009Bookies' favourite Hilary Mantel scooped the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her "demanding" novel about Henry VIII's adviser Thomas Cromwell.
Set in the 1520s - and also described as "hard work" by judges - Wolf Hall tells the story of Cromwell's rise to prominence in the Tudor court.
The book won by a secret narrow majority vote of three to two after more than three hours' deliberation, which Ion Trewin, literary director of the Booker Prizes said was not an unusual divide.
Mantel's work was picked from a shortlist of literary heavyweights including Sarah Waters, AS Byatt and JM Coetzee - who would have been the first person to win the prize three times.
Bookmaker William Hill had Mantel as odds-on favourite to win the award at 10/11 - the shortest odds it has ever given a book to win the prize.
Mr Trewin said the last time a favourite walked off with the prize was Yann Martel's Life of Pi in 2002, which went on to shift more than one million copies in the UK and the Commonwealth.
He said: "Everybody says: 'Oh the favourites never win'. This year, it has."
Mr Trewin said sales of the longlist and shortlist had rocketed "much more so than any previous year".
He said the prize was set up to reward quality, but also to sell books. Mr Trewin added: "And there's nothing wrong with commerce as well as art."
Wolf Hall has already sold 48,000 copies, according to UK publishing figures.
Last year's gong went to Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger, which has shifted more than half a million copies in the UK.
South African author Coetzee made the shortlist with his fictionalised memoir Summertime, while Waters was in the running for her novel The Little Stranger.
Completing the shortlist were Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze and Byatt's The Children's Book.
Mantel, 57, spent five years writing Wolf Hall and is currently working on a sequel.
Born in Glossop, Derbyshire, she worked as a social worker before living in Botswana and Saudi Arabia, returning to Britain in the mid-1980s.
Her triumph marks the first time the publisher Fourth Estate has had a Man Booker Prize winner.
Peter Clarke, chief executive of Man Group presented Mantel with her £50,000 cheque.
Wearing a gold outfit, Mantel told an audience in London last night: "I hesitated for such a long time before beginning to write this book, actually for about 20 years."
Mantel, who said she wanted to capture the imagination of readers generally, thanked the book trade for their support.
She said that if winning the Booker Prize was like being in a train crash "at this moment I am happily flying through the air".
Mantel joked that she would be spending the money on "sex, drugs and rock and roll.
"To be a little less stupid, living, I think. It buys time. That's what an author wants."
She described the award as "earnings", saying it may be a cold way to look at it "but cost out what an author earns per hour, it's far, far less than the minimum wage ...
"It must pay the mortgage, as authors have to do."
She said that the winning work was perhaps 30 years in the making, saying: "You have to grow, you have to grow up."
She said the sequel to the book would be titled The Mirror And The Light.
"What I have got at the moment is a huge box of notes," she said.
Mantel was herself a judge for the prize in 1990 when Byatt's Possession won.
She said that being a previous Booker judge meant she knew anything could happen in the final meeting.
"I never for one moment thought that being a favourite would weigh with the judges. In fact I thought it might weigh the opposite way."
Reader views (1)
Bravo for a proper book by someone with literary skill! But, I wonder, have those much lauded authors, Rowling or Brown, ever won a serious literary award?
- Ted, London, 07/10/2009 07:52
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