Almanac of Story Tellers: Hilary Mantel

 Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of July 6th

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    It is the 187th day of the year, leaving 178 days remaining in 2022.

   

    On this date in 1952, the prize-winning novelist and short-story writer, Hilary Mantel, was born outside of Manchester, England.

    Her stories, often described as darkly comic, are set in the past or in contemporary locales where she had briefly lived.  They delve into social issues in England, Saudi Arabia, and revolutionary France. She writes about ordinary home life, among ordinary people, although her books deal with large swatches of history.

    Mantel grew up in the East Midlands in  England, and in 1977 moved to Botswana, Africa, and later Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Her social isolation in those countries led her to writing novels, and she also drew inspiration from those places.

    Her first novel, however, was based on her experiences as a social worker in England. Every Day is Mother's Day tells the story of a social worker's involvement with a socially unbalanced woman and her autistic daughter.

    After returning to England, she wrote Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, using a city block in Jeddah to explore politics amid cultural clashes between Islam and the West. A Change of Climate explores British missionaries in South Africa. A Place of Greater Safety tells of the French Revolution from the perspective of three of its participants.

    In 2009, her novel about Thomas Cromwell in the court of King Henry VIII was a smashing success, praised for its richly layered detail and complex characters. It won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

    It turned into a triology, with the second novel, Bring Up the Bodies, also winning the Booker Prize. The finale, The Mirror and the Light, was longlisted for the prize.

    Mantel also has published two collections of short stories, Learning to Talk and The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. After the second one was published in 2014, she told an interviewer  that she writes "quite slowly," so another collection might take a while.

    She and her husband live in a seaside community in Devon, England.