Dame Hilary Mantel

Dame Hilary Mantel (1952-2022) was one of the most distinguished writers of her generation. She spent her first undergraduate year at LSE before moving to Sheffield University, from which she graduated in law in 1973. 

She became a full-time writer in the mid-1980s, and is the author of eleven novels, two short story collections and a memoir, Giving up the Ghost. She was appointed CBE in 2006, and DBE in 2014, and among many other prizes and honours, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by LSE in 2014. 

She has described her year at the School as “one of the most vivid times in my life” and drew on her experiences in her novel, An Experiment in Love, and memoir Giving up the Ghost, in which she describes “The rattling, down-at-heel, overcrowded buildings”, adding “pleased me better than any grassy quad or lancet window”. 

Hilary was a writer of remarkable versatility who was equally at home producing fictional historical narratives, contemporary novels and short stories. She was also an outstanding reviewer and essayist. Her best-known and most acclaimed works were a trilogy on the life of Thomas Cromwell comprising Wolf Hall (2009), Bring up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020), with the first two in the series going on to win the Man Booker Prize. The research which went into the writing of these books created a captivating combination of intensely psychological characterisation with a panoptic vision of the social world in which the characters reside. Remote in time as that world is from our own, and unsympathetic though many have found him to be, Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell is a man whose concerns and feelings are made entirely legible to the modern reader.