As her novel Wolf Hall is named the best of the century so far, the author looks back on the `long walk´ she has taken with Thomas Cromwell o The 100 best books of the 21st centuryFor years, Hilary Mantel was one of literature´s best-kept secrets, unknown to all but a devoted yet limited following. Then along came Wolf Hall. `Maybe this book will win one of the prizes that have been withheld so far,` ventured its Guardian reviewer when it was published in 2009, in what was to prove one of the understatements of the millennium. It won both the Man Booker prize and the US´s National Book Critics Circle award, selling more than 1m copies on each side of the Atlantic, and going on to colonise theatre and TV.The second volume in the trilogy, 2011´s Bring Up the Bodies, kept the bandwagon rolling so fast and furiously that, eight years later, breathless excitement greeted the appearance of a mysterious billboard in Leicester Square in May, the first hint that the third volume was imminent. (The Mirror and the Light is out in 2020.) Mantel is phlegmatic, saying: `Some readers congratulate me on beginning a career in my 50s. I´m glad, of course, if I can offer anyone midlife encouragement. But I began writing at 22, wrote for 12 years before I published anything, and broke through in my mid-30s. I´ve had plenty of time to brace myself for success.` Continue reading...
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