British · 1952–2022
Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize twice—for "Wolf Hall" in 2009 and "Bring Up the Bodies" in 2012—becoming the first woman and first British author to achieve that double. Her Thomas Cromwell trilogy reimagined Tudor England through a blacksmith's son who rises to power. Mantel's historical fiction combined painstaking research with psychological insight, making the past feel urgent and strange. She died in 2022, leaving "The Mirror & the Light" as her final testament.