Bring up the Bodies wins the 2012 Man Booker Prize: Second triumph for Hilary Mantel

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Hilary Mantel is tonight named the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her novel Bring up the Bodies, published by Fourth Estate.

Hilary Mantel is the first woman and the first British author to win the prize twice. At 60, she is only the third double winner alongside J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey. She is also the first person to win the prize for two novels in a trilogy, following her success in 2009 with Wolf Hall.

Hilary was previously longlisted in 2005 for Beyond Black. She was also a judge for the prize in 1990 when A.S. Byatt won with Possession.

Bring up the Bodies is the second win for Fourth Estate, following the success of Wolf Hall. The second book in Mantel’s trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell, Bring up the Bodies charts the bloody downfall of Anne Boleyn. Mantel has been widely praised for her rich ‘descriptive intimacy’ (Telegraph), ‘novelistic intelligence’ (New Yorker) and ability to transport the reader to the fifteenth century. Margaret Atwood praised her in The Guardian, saying ‘literary invention does not fail her: she's as deft and verbally adroit as ever’, whilst the judges admired Mantel's ‘even greater mastery of method, her powerful realism in the separateness of past and present - and the vivid depiction of English character and landscape’.

Sir Peter Stothard, Chair of judges, made the announcement at the awards dinner which was televised live by the BBC from London’s Guildhall.  Mantel was presented with a cheque for £50,000 by Peter Clarke, Chief Executive of Man.

Sir Peter comments: ‘This double accolade is uniquely deserved. Hilary Mantel has rewritten the rules for historical fiction. In Bring up the Bodies, our greatest modern writer retells the origins of modern England.’

Winning the prize in 2009 brought Hilary Mantel worldwide recognition and record sales; winning the prize this year will mean a further considerable increase. In addition to her £50,000 prize, she was also given, along with the rest of the 2012 shortlist, £2,500 and a specially commissioned handbound edition of her book.

Stothard was joined on the 2012 judging panel by: Dinah Birch, academic and literary critic; Amanda Foreman, historian, writer and broadcaster; Dan Stevens, actor; and Bharat Tandon, academic, writer and reviewer.

This year’s shortlist has been widely acclaimed. With the judging panel’s emphasis on the role of the novelist in renewing the English language, the media has celebrated the ‘return of the literary novel’ with the Man Booker Prize.

The Winner

Bring up the Bodies

By Hilary Mantel           

Published by Fourth Estate (£20)

The year is 1535 and Thomas Cromwell, chief Minister to Henry VIII, must work both to please the king and keep the nation safe. Anne Boleyn, for whose sake Henry has broken with Rome and created his own church, has failed to do what she promised: bear a son to secure the Tudor line. As Henry develops a dangerous attraction to Wolf Hall’s Jane Seymour, Thomas must negotiate a ‘truth’ that will satisfy Henry and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge undamaged from the bloody theatre of Anne’s final days.

A former winner of the Man Booker Prize (2009), Hilary Mantel CBE was born in Derbyshire, England on 6 July 1952. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. Her books include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988); Fludd (1989) winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize; A Place of Greater Safety (1992), winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year award; A Change of Climate (1994); An Experiment in Love (1995), winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize; Beyond Black (2005), shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize and for the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and Wolf Hall (2009), winner of the Man Booker Prize. In 2006 she was also awarded a CBE.

For further information, please contact Patrick Hargadon at HarperCollins

Tel: 0208 307 4067, email: [email protected], mob:  07971878443

 

 

Notes to Editors

 

• 
  Hilary Mantel is available for interview. Please contact Patrick Hargadon at HarperCollins: Tel: 0208 307 4067, mob:  07971878443, email: [email protected]

 

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  The winner of the Man Booker Prize was chosen from 145 entries, including 11 called in by the judges.  The 2012 shortlisted titles were:

 

Author                                Title (Publisher)

Tan Twan Eng                   The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)

Deborah Levy                    Swimming Home (And Other Stories / Faber & Faber)

Hilary Mantel                    Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)

Alison Moore                      The Lighthouse (Salt)

Will Self                               Umbrella (Bloomsbury)

Jeet Thayil                          Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)

 

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  The specially commissioned handbound edition of the book was created by Sue Doggett, a Fellow of the UK’s principal bookbinding society, the Designer Bookbinders

• 
  Each year UK publishers may submit two full-length novels written by a citizen of the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland or Zimbabwe and published between 1 October 2011 and 30 September 2012.  Any title by an author who has previously been shortlisted for the prize may be submitted

 

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  Julian Barnes won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction with The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape). The book has now sold over 300,000 in the UK in hard copy alone

 

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  The Booker Prize for Fiction was first awarded in 1969, and Man was announced as the sponsor of the prize in April 2002.  In October 2011, a renewed sponsorship agreement was announced which assured the future of the prize. For a full history of the prize including previous winners, shortlisted authors and judges visit the website: www.themanbookerprize.com

 

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  The Booker Prize Foundation Advisory Committee, which advises on any changes to the rules and on the selection of the judges, represents all sides of the book world.   Its members are:

 

Ion Trewin, Chair (Literary Director, Booker Prize Foundation); Richard Cable, publisher; Mark Chilton, Company Secretary and General Counsel of Booker Group plc; Peter Clarke, Chief Executive, Man; Jonathan Douglas, Director of the National Literacy Trust; Maggie Fergusson, writer and Secretary of the Royal Society of Literature; Basil Comely, BBC TV; Derek Johns, literary agent; Peter Kemp, Chief Fiction Reviewer, The Sunday Times; James Daunt,  Managing Director of Waterstone’s; Nigel Newton, publisher; Fiammetta Rocco, literary editor, The Economist (Man Booker International Prize Administrator); Eve Smith (Company Secretary, the Booker Prize Foundation); and Robert Topping; Topping & Company Booksellers

 

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  The Booker Prize Foundation is a registered charity (no 1090049) which, since 2002, has been responsible for the award of the prize. The trustees of the Booker Prize Foundation are former Chairman of Booker plc, Jonathan Taylor CBE (Chair); Lord Baker of Dorking CH; playwright and President of the Royal Literary Fund, Sir Ronald Harwood CBE; Principal of Mansfield College Oxford and former Chair of the British Council, Baroness Kennedy QC; Professor of Creative Writing, Royal Holloway College University of London and former Poet Laureate, Sir Andrew Motion; broadcaster, James Naughtie; biographer, Victoria Glendinning and former Finance Director of Rentokil plc, Christopher Pearce. Martyn Goff CBE, former Man Booker Prize administrator, is President of the Foundation and Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne and Baroness Neuberger are Vice Presidents

 

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  Man is a world-leading alternative investment management business. It has expertise in a wide range of liquid investment styles including managed futures, equity, credit and convertibles, emerging markets, global macro and multi-manager, combined with powerful product structuring, distribution and client service capabilities. As of June 30 2012, Man managed $52.7 billion.

 

The original business was founded in 1783. Today, Man Group plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a member of the FTSE 250 Index with a market capitalisation of around £ 1.7 billion. Man is a signatory to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). Man also supports many awards, charities and initiatives around the world, including sponsorship of the Man Booker literary prizes. Further information can be found at www.man.com

 

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  Booker is the UK's leading food wholesaler with over 170 branches nationwide.  It serves over 350,000 independent businesses

 

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  The Booker Prize Foundation has a longstanding partnership with the RNIB, and the Foundation funds the production by RNIB of the shortlist in formats for the visually impaired including braille, giant print and Talking Books

 

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  The Booker Prize Archive was given on loan in 2003 to Oxford Brookes University where it now resides

 

 

More details of these events and further information about the prize can be found on the Man Booker Prize website www.themanbookerprize.com.

 

Katy MacMillan-Scott or Amy Barder at Four Colman Getty

Office: 020 3023 9076 (Katy) / 020 3023 9055 (Amy)

Mobile: 07786567887 (Katy) / 07956337231 (Amy)

[email protected] / [email protected]