Photograph: Giles Keyte/BBC/Company Productions Ltd As opposed to the male writer who just wants his cheque.”Ĭlaire Foy as Anne Boleyn in the television version of Wolf Hall. It’s this version in which the woman writer is sentimentally attached to her creation. “It’s not something I’ve ever said it’s what people think I should have said.

I’ve been like a factory!” She also chafes at the suggestion that her latest book was delayed because she was reluctant to kill off Cromwell. “I’ve got quite amused at people suggesting I have writer’s block, you know. There are so many novels enfolded in the novels that sometimes, I wonder – well, it’s a pamphlet compared to what it could be.”Īt a combined total of more than 2,000 pages – with The Mirror & the Light accounting for nearly half of them – you couldn’t get much further from a pamphlet. But I didn’t see how it was going to unfold from the middle in the way it did.” As she went deeper into her researches, she found multiple stories began to emerge, “each one of them worth a book. Back in 2005, could she have imagined what lay ahead? The two Booker prize trophies that Cromwell has already brought Mantel perch unobtrusively on a bookcase and there are few signs of the immense industry that the enterprise has required – perhaps because Mantel sets off each morning for a small flat up the road in order to write, working on stage versions and an illustrated companion to Wolf Hall.

Now, here we are, in the author’s home in the genteel Devon seaside town of Budleigh Salterton, with more than 1.5m copies of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies sold and the conclusion of her epic trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, sending pre-orders through the roof.

And so if we would excuse her, she had lots to do. It was, she explained, set in Tudor England, at the time of the great break with Rome, and featured both Henry VIII and his notorious chief adviser, Thomas Cromwell. As we readied ourselves for the flight, she explained that she’d be quiet for the next few hours she was planning to immerse herself in a new project. A bout 15 years ago, Hilary Mantel got on a plane to Russia, on a cultural visit to Perm, near the Ural mountains.

The mirror & the light hilary mantel