Man Booker Prize won by Hilary Mantel’s tale of historical intrigue

From The Times, October 6, 2009

Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent

Hilary Mantel, winner of the Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall

The hottest favourite in the 40-year history of the Man Booker Prize edged home last night when Wolf Hall was named the winner in a secret ballot by three votes to two.

The judges described Hilary Mantel’s 650-page doorstopper about political manoeuvring at the court of Henry VIII as an “extraordinary piece of storytelling . . . a modern novel that happens to be set in the 16th century”.

It is the first favourite to triumph in Britain’s leading literary competition since Yann Martel’s Life of Pi in 2002. Booksellers predicted that Wolf Hall would go on to outsell all previous Booker winners.

James Naughtie, the broadcaster and chairman of the judges, said that Mantel’s book was the most towering achievement in a shortlist that resembled an Alpine landscape of accomplishment. His panel — which featured Lucasta Miller, a critic and biographer, Michael Prodger, the literary editor of The Sunday Telegraph, John Mullan, an academic and author, and Sue Perkins, the comedian and broadcaster — met for three “passionate, good-humoured” hours.

“We had to see some books sailing down the swannee that we had much admired,” Naughtie said.

Mantel, 57, is a seasoned novelist who has been shortlisted for the Orange prize and the Commonwealth prize for fiction. Wolf Hall revolves around Thomas Cromwell, the bullying, quick-thinking son of a Putney drunk and blacksmith who becomes Henry VIII’s most powerful adviser.

She said last night: “I hesitated for such a long time before beginning to write this book, actually for about 20 years ... At this moment I am happily flying through the air.”

The decision dashed J. M. Coetzee’s hopes of a record third win after victory in 1983 with Life and Times of Michael K and in 1999 with Disgrace.

Booksellers and readers alike will hope that Mantel’s intention to write a sequel comes to fruition sooner than her promised novel about Jean-Paul Marat, “guest star” of A Place of Greater Safety. Seventeen years after her French Revolution epic was published there is no sign of the follow-up.

However, in a vintage year Wolf Hall was the novel that dominated the betting, the booksales, the e-book sales and the headlines.Going into yesterday’s judging it was the 10-11 favourite with William Hill, the shortest odds given to any nominee. No evidence was found to suggest foul play and Naughtie insisted that none of the panel knew who the winner would be until after the field had been whittled down to two and Ion Trewin, the prize’s director, announced the results of a secret ballot.

Wolf Hall was also doing brisker business than its rivals at the tills. Initially it was outsold by Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger but, according to Waterstone’s, sales of the book increased by 500 per cent after it was shortlisted. It has sold six times as well in e-book format as its nearest rival.

Recent Booker panels have pointed out how they were more open-minded about what constituted literary fiction. This year’s longlist included Me Cheeta, a spoof Hollywood memoir, purportedly written by a chimpanzee.

Despite its highbrow reputation, the prize was founded to sell books. Mr Trewin said that it was achieving its original purpose: “not only to reward superb fiction but to encourage people to go out and read it”.

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Booker prize for Hilary Mantel: did the right woman win?

• Hilary Mantel has won this year's Man Booker prize with her fictionalised life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall. I'm delighted - are you?

• Sarah Crown
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 October 2009 06.00 BST

Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

So there it is: for the first time in a decade, the bookies' favourite has romped away with the laurels. Hilary Mantel's revisionist history of the life of Tudor arch-villain Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall, has won the 2009 Man Booker prize, and I for one couldn't be happier about it. On a remarkably strong shortlist, her novel stood out for me – as the most imaginative, the most ambitious, the most complete. She has taken a well-known – even well-worn – story and injected it with thrumming vitality: reproducing the sights, sounds and pungent smells of London in the 16th century; recomplicating characters that have been worn down, over hundreds of years, to attenuated, if gaudy, ciphers.

She's also, by the by, managed to sneak a 'genre' novel into the Booker winners' notoriously literary paddock - and recalibrated the arena of historical fiction in the process. The accusation that this year's shortlist was weighted too heavily towards the historical has dogged the debate surrounding it, but even those who found Wolf Hall mannered or boggy – and there were plenty who did; the Observer's literary editor William Skidelsky among them – agreed that Mantel's novel was a far more exciting proposition than the usual ladies-and-lances epics that the genre turns out. This is an acute and implicating psychological study of a man whose individual actions are sympathetic even if his trajectory is deplorable; whose mind is brilliant and beguiling even if his motives are black. It's subtle and compelling, and above all unputdownable.

Ahem! In my opinion, anyway. But enough of that - what did you all make of it? It was, after all, up against a really stellar shortlist – in particular, I loved Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, which offered an elegant, light-filled counterpoint to Mantel's scheming Tudor murk. Did the right woman win?

Η Χίλαρι Μάντελ κέρδισε το λογοτεχνικό βραβείο Μπούκερ

• Το βιβλίο της «Wolf Hall» παρουσιάζει μία ιστορία του 16 ου αιώνα με σύγχρονο αφηγηματικό τρόπο.

Το «Wolf Hall», ένα ιστορικό μυθιστόρημα για τον σύμβουλο του βασιλιά Ερρίκου του όγδοου, Τόμας Κρόμγουελ της συγγραφέος Χίλαρι Μάντελ κέρδισε το λογοτεχνικό βραβείο Μπούκερ.

«Δίσταζα να γράψω αυτό το βιβλίο για περίπου 20 χρόνια. Είμαι πιο ευτυχισμένη από ποτέ», δήλωσε η 57χρονη συγγραφέας.

Το Μπούκερ είναι ένα από τα πιο δημοφιλή βραβεία αγγλικής λογοτεχνίας για υποψηφίους από την Κοινοπολιτεία ή τη Δημοκρατία της Ιρλανδίας. Ο νικητής κερδίζει 54.000 ευρώ, ενώ το Μπούκερ αποτελεί εγγύηση για την αύξηση των πωλήσεων του έργου του.

Ο περσινός νικητής Άραβιντ Αντίγκα πούλησε πάνω από μισό εκατομμύριο αντίτυπα για το «The White Tiger», ενώ μεταφράστηκε σε 30 γλώσσες. Το «Wolf Hall» κέρδισε μετά από τρίωρη σύσκεψη των κριτών, από τους οποίους 3 ψήφισαν υπέρ και 2 κατά.

Ο πρόεδρος των κριτών και δημοσιογράφος Τζέιμς Νότι υποστήριξε πως «το βιβλίο απαίτησε σκληρή δουλειά, αλλά ανταμείφθηκε». «Η Χίλαρι Μάντελ έγραψε ένα σύγχρονο μυθιστόρημα που όμως εξελίσσεται τον 16 ο αιώνα. Η αφήγηση είναι εξαιρετική», συμπλήρωσε.

www.kathimerini.gr με πληροφορίες από AFP