Hilary Mantel: A Culture Show Special The Culture Show

Hilary Mantel used to be one of Britain's most under-rated writers,

but since winning The Man Booker Prize in 2009,

for her novel Wolf Hall,

she has received international recognition.

Her fiction is dark, compelling and richly textured.

Its subject-matter ranges from The French Revolution

to the Court of Henry VIII,

from dysfunctional families in the North of England

to the life of a troubled psychic in Woking.

"Wolf Hall" is an epic account of the rise of Thomas Cromwell

during the reign of Henry VIII.

It was praised for the immediacy of its prose,

the power of its characterisation, and its savage sense of humour.

Despite a recent interruption due to illness,

she's now working on its sequel, The Mirror and the Light.

In this intimate portrait for The Culture Show,

film-maker James Runcie talks exclusively to Hilary Mantel

about her life and her work.

She begins with a piece of advice.

This is what I recommend to people who ask me how to get published.

Trust your reader. Stop spoon-feeding your reader.

Give your reader credit for being as smart as you at least.

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility.

Cut every page you write by at least one third.

Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours.

Work out what it is you want to say.

Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can.

Eat meat. Drink blood.

Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends.

Rise in the quiet hours of the night

and prick your fingertips,

and use the blood for ink.

But do I take my own advice?

Not a bit.

Hilary Mantel is an intense, troubling, and evocative writer.

Her principal themes are of history and individual identity,

religion and rebellion,

and the influence of the dead upon the living.

Her fiction asks how we come to be the people we are

and it occupies the hinterland

between what is real and what is imagined.

It's a world in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Hilary, whenever I read your work,

I have to say I find it rather unsettling and disturbing.

It makes me feel unstable.

Is that a deliberate effect? Are you seeking that effect?

I don't think I can help it.

It's very much...

the way I view the world, I think.

I don't trust it tremendously.

I always feel that if I put my hand through the wall,

my hand might go through it.

I think as a child, you see, I was always listening hard,

I was always trying to get some purchase on what was going on

or work out what was happening in the next room.

And...there's a little bit

in Wolf Hall, where Cardinal Woolsey says,

"Never let me hear you say

"you don't know what goes on behind closed doors.

"Find out!"

And that, I spent my childhood trying to do that,

so that becomes a habit.

You really do need to know for your self preservation

whether the devil is behind that door.

Not everyone thinks that.

Fools!

SHE LAUGHS

Hilary Mantel's disquieting imagination

has its roots in her childhood experiences

in the North of England in the 1950s.

I grew up in a village on the fringes of the Peak District.

A village called Hadfield, a mill village.

A strange place, rather bleak,

on the edges of the moorland.

There was a sense of it being not just at the end

of the railway line from Manchester but rather at the end of everything.

It's a self-contained community,

where the people had a mordent sense of humour,

if it was a sense of humour.

The winter was very long in Hadfield.

The darkness seemed to last a long time.

"There is a colour of paint that doesn't seem to exist any more,

"that was a characteristic pigment of my childhood.

"It's a faded, rain-drenched crimson,

"like stale and drying blood."

"I use this paint scrape -

"oxblood, let's call it -

"to refurbish the rooms of my childhood,

"which were otherwise dark green, and cream,

"and more lately a cloudy yellow,

"which hung about at shoulder height, like the aftermath of a fire."

Hilary was born in 1952.

This is the street where she lived, 12 miles from Manchester.

Her grandparents and great aunt lived at numbers 56 and 58

and Hilary's childhood home was at number 20 Brosscroft.

The family were originally Catholic Irish immigrants

and that Catholicism was to have a profound impact on Hilary's writing.

I grew up unquestioningly within Catholicism,

so unquestioningly that I took it all onboard

and of course what it's telling you,

what you're being inducted in, from the age of four,

is the knowledge that there is another world,

that there is an invisible reality

which is far more important than this one.

It is the realm of invisible angels around you,

it's the realm of what happens after death,

that life is actually transient and fairly meaningless.

You have a destination - it's heaven or hell.

I think I took it as read that there was an unseen realm

and that's the bit I retained

when I ceased to believe in doctrine

and ceased to practice as a Catholic.

I think I still had a very profound sense of...the invisible,

which is just as well because it's in invisible worlds

that the writer spends her time.

When I was about eight years old...

..I was in the garden of our house in Hadfield.

I was alone. I cannot say I saw something...

..but I sensed something. Something seemed to be there.

And it was more a movement than an object.

A sort of slow spiral movement.

And yet I couldn't say that I saw it, I was just aware of it.

And it just seemed to me to be incredibly evil,

the essence of evil.

I immediately felt very sick.

I felt as if in no time at all the thing had travelled inside me

and as if all the cells of my body were being spun around

in this really sinister motion.

I don't really call it seeing the devil.

That's just the easiest way to describe it.

It was as if I had come upon a principle of evil.

And I immediately felt ashamed and as if I were to blame,

because if I had just looked the other way,

I wouldn't have seen it. It was...

um...

A scene you were not meant to witness.

This vision was the first manifestation of Hilary's obsession

with a world beyond our own.

It was a defining moment in her childhood,

one of many that are described

in her 2003 Memoir, Giving up the Ghost,

an account of her life that goes right back to her earliest memory.

"This is the first thing I remember.

"I am sitting up in my pram.

"We are outside, in the park called Bankswood.

"My mother walks backwards.

"I hold out my arms because I don't want her to go.

"She say's she's only going to take my picture.

"I don't understand why she goes backwards,

"back and aslant, tacking to one side.

"The trees overhead make a noise of urgent conversation,

"too quick to catch. The leaves part, the sky peers down at me."

"Away and away she goes till she comes to a halt.

"She raises her arm and partly hides her face.

"They sky and trees rush over my head. I feel dizzied.

"The entire world is sound, movement.

"She moves towards me, speaking."

"The memory ends."

What's your mother like?

My mother is a very beautiful, lively, gregarious,

rather dramatic woman.

Extroverted. And full of talents,

which, if she'd been born in a different place or a different time,

might've come out. She's a good singer, a dancer.

She has all the minor graceful household arts.

But of course at the age of 14, 15,

she was working in the mill.

That was what life was like, she did what everybody else did.

She could've had a far bigger life.

And I think, you see, she was struggling for something else,

she wanted to get beyond the limitations of Hadfield.

And she was towing us children with her.

Hilary's mother Margaret was married to a man called Henry Thompson.

There are no surviving family photographs of him.

This is because, in the late 1950s,

Margaret found a new partner, Jack Mantel.

At first, Hilary's father didn't leave home,

but moved into the spare room.

Henry, my father, was...

..a very quiet man, it seemed to me.

He liked doing cross-word puzzles. He taught me to play chess.

And he taught me that it is possible to sit quietly in a room.

And you can be reading a book and be a companion to someone else

who's sitting in that room reading a book.

When Jack came into the household,

Jack was interested in weightlifting.

And he used to sing and be noisy

and I thought it was great, really, at first.

I didn't know what was happening.

And then, over the years,

from my being about seven years old to ten years old,

my father was still living in the house but more and more like a ghost.

It was as if he was just melting into the wall.

And then the year I was 11, the summer I was 11,

he melted away entirely, and I never saw him again.

He just left?

He left on the day the furniture van came and took us off to Romiley.

So there was abrupt closure.

My childhood was over.

I was starting again, new town, new name.

And it was as if the past was just written out, erased.

And we had to not talk about the past.

But, of course, we'd only gone about eight miles,

so the secret we were keeping was a kind of open secret.

And...we spent our days frantically bolting a door

that had already been kicked open.

"After my first week at the convent, I went home to my mother, worried."

"'Big girls at school,' I told her, 'ask my why I've changed my name'

"'Tell them,' she said, 'that it's for private reasons.'"

"I tried out this turn of phrase.

"Private reasons."

"'Oh, yes,' the big girls said. 'We understand that.

"'But we want to know what they are.'"

The move to Romiley, just under ten miles from Manchester,

sharpened Hilary's awareness of the uncertain gap

between what could be spoken aloud, and what had to remain hidden.

And this gap, between public statements and private thoughts,

lies at the heart of her fiction.

When I was a child, things happened that very often

you didn't know if they were tragic or hilarious,

so...you stayed poised on that tightrope,

not quite knowing how to react.

And I think there is something gleeful and childlike

in the humour that runs through all my books.

What I hope to do is knock the reader off balance for a moment

so they don't know whether to laugh or scream.

I don't want my reader ever to be settled.

In the ideal world, the reader wouldn't be able to guess

what the next sentence might contain.

I aim to disconcert, I suppose.

But then I find life disconcerting, I find that it is like that,

that there are layers beneath the obvious of almost every interaction.

Hilary lived in Romiley until she was 18.

Although she was educated at a good Catholic girls school,

the '60s did not pass her by.

When I was a teenager I wasn't pretty but, I had the looks

that were very fashionable in the '60s,

because I had this long, fair hair

and...I was very slim.

It was what everyone wanted to look like in those days,

you know, walking around behind a curtain of hair.

Did you get propositioned a lot?

People used to sing songs at me on the street.

SHE LAUGHS Yes!

When Hilary was 17, her social life centred around Manchester.

Here she started dating Gerald McEwan,

a man she's married not once, but twice.

Hilary, have you got any pictures of Gerald as a groovy young man?

Well, we were just 20 when we were married so, um...

Yes, here is on our wedding day.

He looks profoundly unhappy.

Of course, because we were so young,

people thought that our marriage was going to be a disaster.

Maybe that's why there was no professional record of it.

People thought it could be expunged all the easier

if there was no wedding album.

What does Gerald give you?

When I first met him, I thought, "How kind he is."

He was immensely good natured

and to me...

I don't like disputes and arguments on the domestic front.

I want a quiet life, not to be torn up

by melodrama going on all the time.

And I think I saw the chance

of a much better, calmer, quieter life with Gerald.

Young writer's partners have a tough time of it.

Yes, I think so.

This is why it's good to marry early and get them trained!

Hilary and Gerald were married when they were still students.

Gerald was set to be a geologist

while Hilary was training to be a lawyer,

first at the London School of Economics and then at Sheffield.

She was hoping to become a politician.

At first she had no intention of being a writer.

Then she fell ill.

I first complained when I was 19.

Going to the student health service and saying,

"I don't know really in what way I am ill, but I have strange pains

"and I really need to find out what's the matter."

But I was told that there was no physical condition

that could account for these pains, they were all in my mind.

I was an over-sensitive, too intense, over-ambitious girl

putting too much pressure on myself

and producing these pains as symptom of stress

and I was dosed up with Valium and all the rest

and I was told to go away.

And...once it's in your medical records that you're a neurotic,

then, you know, everything you say or do goes to prove the case.

You can't break out of it, and all this time,

the physical damage was running on.

How has illness affected your life and your writing?

It's such a big question, you know.

Part of the reason I became a writer,

I think, part of the reason I made that choice...

..was that by the time I'd come out of university

I realised there was something badly wrong with me

and it wasn't madness and it wasn't being neurotic.

There was something physically wrong.

I obviously wasn't going to be a lawyer.

I wasn't going to be a politician.

Both careers need more stamina than I had at my command.

And I began to think

that some of the visions I'd had of what my future would be,

I would have to write them off.

I would have to find an occupation that left me in control.

Where I could work my own hours.

And so very consciously I set up my stall to be a writer.

In 1974, at the age of 22, Hilary began to embark on an epic,

800 page account of the French Revolution

concentrating, essentially on the lives of three men -

Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins -

from the beginning of the Revolution to The Terror.

The novel was called A Place of Greater Safety.

She researched and wrote it in Manchester Central Library.

Sometimes people talk about the historical novel

as if there were two opposed camps, fact and fiction.

That isn't so, at all.

And as soon as we learn any history

we should learn to be suspicious of that history.

We should learn to question the historical record all the time,

say, "I think I know this but why do I think I know it?

"Who's telling me this, and who wants me to believe it?"

"Who starts the riots that lead to the fall of the Bastille?

"Why him, why then? Why that particular moment?

"Could it have been someone else?

"And if it could have been, why wasn't it?"

These questions perplex me and they intrigue me

and I come back to them time and time again.

The difference between political history as it is written on the page

and the way it feels to the person who is an actor inside it.

The intention behind the novel is to give history drama and immediacy.

The reader is thrown right into the middle of the action,

and follows Queen Marie Antoinette all the way to the guillotine.

"The tumbrel waited in the courtyard.

"It was an ordinary cart, once used for carrying wood,

"now with planks across it for seats.

"At the sight of it she lost her composure, she gaped in fear,

"but she didn't cry out.

"She asked the executioner to untie her hands for a moment,

"and when he did so she squatted in a corner, by a wall, and urinated."

"Her hands were tied again, and she was put into the cart.

"Under the shorn hair and the plain white cap,

"her tired eyes searched for pity in the faces around her.

"The journey to the place of execution lasted for an hour."

"She didn't speak.

"As she mounted the steps, paid, indifferent hands kept her balanced.

"Her body began to shake, her limbs to give way.

"In her blindness and terror she stepped on the executioner's foot.

"'I beg your pardon, monsieur,' she whispered.

"'I didn't mean to do it."

"A few minutes after noon, her head was off."

While writing A Place of Greater Safety,

Hilary continued to experience the symptoms of an illness

that was to remain undiagnosed for eight years.

It was finally discovered to be endometriosis.

Unfortunately, you can't describe endometriosis in one sentence.

The endometrium is the lining of the womb

so this is a special tissue which is shed every month

in response to hormonal influence.

In endometriosis, this kind of tissue is found in other parts of the body,

typically through the pelvis

but it can be virtually everywhere in the body.

Wherever it is, it acts like itself, so it bleeds every month.

And then scar tissue builds up in the small spaces of the body.

Depending where it is, you get a variety of symptoms.

Quite a large variety of symptoms.

Mostly involving pain and nausea and fatigue.

So by the time it was diagnosed, I was 27,

and I was in a very bad way.

I was rendered immediately infertile

and it wasn't just a case of having a hysterectomy,

my ovaries were removed so that at the age of 27,

I was plunged into menopause.

And...it was...worse than one could have ever imagined.

"The visitor's idea of hospital is different from the patient's idea.

"Visitors imagine themselves trapped in that ward, in that bed,

"in their present state of assertive wellbeing.

"They imagine being bored,

"but boredom occurs when your consciousness ranges about,

"looking for somewhere to settle.

"But the patient's concentration is distilled,

"moment by moment. Breathing,

"not being sick,

"not coughing or else coughing in the right way,

"producing bodily secretions

"in the vessels provided and not on the floor.

"The visitor sees the hospital as needles and knives, metal teeth,

"metal bars, sees the foggy meeting between the damp summer air outside

"and the overheated exhalations of the sickroom."

"But the patient sees no such contrast.

"She can't imagine the street, the motorway.

"To her, the hospital is this squashed pillow,

"this water glass, this bell pull,

"and the nice judgment required to know when to use it."

"For the visitor, everything points outwards,

"to the release at the end of the visiting hour,

"and to the patient, everything points inwards,

"and the furthest extension of her consciousness

"is not the rattle of car keys, the road home,

"the first drink of the evening,

"but the beep and plip-plop of monitors and drips,

"the flashing of figures on screens.

"These are how you register your existence,

"these are the way you matter."

After the endometriosis reoccurred,

when I was in my early 30s,

I was given a drug which...

..doubled my size.

So, from being something like a pencil line on the wall,

I became the blossoming sofa-like creature you see now before you.

And that is very strange and, of course, it's...

for a woman...

It's terribly destroying to one's self image and self projection.

But what can you do? You're only given one body to live in.

You've just got to get on with it.

"What I would have liked was a choice in life.

"Leisure, to reverse my earlier decision

"that children didn't matter to me.

"Leisure, to ask if circumstances or my mind had changed.

"No-one can predict that the game will be over for them

"at the age of 27.

"The time I fell in love is the time I should have acted,

"and now that an era of my life is over,

"and my school friends are becoming grandmothers,

"I miss the child I never had."

What's to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?

In the mid to late 1970s,

Hilary was still investigating the lives of the dead in her writing.

She supported herself financially by working,

as her mother had done, in ladies fashions

at one of Manchester's largest department stores.

Did it help your interest in people, working in the department store,

seeing what people wore, seeing how they behaved,

early versions of characters?

I think I was doing it really so that I could keep my mind clear.

You know, I was at a bit of a loose end, um, professionally speaking.

What I wanted to do by that stage was to write my book.

I wanted to write A Place of Greater Safety.

I used to stand there, as it might be,

in the sheepskin department in August,

on a totally deserted fashion floor,

dreaming up what I was going to write when I got home.

So it was a job that left your mind vacant.

Hilary worked as a shop assistant for four years, but in 1977,

just before she finished writing A Place of Greater Safety,

her husband Gerald was offered a new job, as a geologist in Botswana.

The couple moved, but Hilary continued to work as she wrote,

this time as a teacher in the local school.

We were in Botswana for five years, the end of the 70s,

the early '80s. It was a very, very underdeveloped country at that time.

You had just one tarred road between our town and the capital.

It...was a good life in many ways, I did a lot of writing there,

But you were working in one of these very closed communities,

the expatriate society was very small,

very gossipy, very destructive.

Things happened that just wouldn't have happened in England,

the rate of attrition was terrible.

The...bad accidents, the premature deaths, the suicides,

the illnesses... the fulminating adulteries.

It's all the expatriate cliche, actually.

And the fact that you were cut off there,

it intensified, concentrated the evils of the whole process.

-Evils?

-The evils, yes, I think so.

It was an unnatural way to live.

It was a difficult time.

Although she was still writing, Hilary fell ill once more,

and the pressure on her marriage proved intolerable.

When you marry so early, obviously what you're going to have

is a series of different marriages almost.

And it's a cliche to say it, but it's true that you're going to change,

maybe in different ways and at a different rate.

We'd come to one of those points

where we seemed to be going in different directions.

I felt not understood.

And, I think...

also it was important to say that it was a double life crisis,

in that I had finished my book about the French Revolution.

I'd taken it back in the hope of selling it...

and I found myself in hospital instead.

The book was seen by one publisher, who rejected it.

And...it felt like a series of doors slamming, you see.

So, by the time I went back to Botswana,

a lot of the things that had seemed important to me

now seemed irrelevant.

We separated.

18 months later, we met again.

Gerald was on the brink of going to Saudi Arabia.

And everything looked different.

The couple had divorced in 1980 and re-married in 1982.

Gerald went to Saudi Arabia as a scientific editor

for the Ministry of Mineral Resources.

It was a secretive, claustrophobic world,

where it was made difficult for women to go out alone.

In many ways, Hilary was trapped.

In the flat I lived the longest, I had to have the lights on all day

There were small windows,

they were high up and they were made of frosted glass.

The Saudis did not like the idea of people looking in or you looking out.

It was immensely lonely.

What I did was to start another book.

I think I had seen

that A Place of Greater Safety was not the novel

that I was going to break through into the market place with

and that I'd better write something that was short,

was more commercial, was the best I could do.

That book was Every Day is Mother's Day,

the story of Muriel and Evelyn Axon, a reclusive mother and daughter

who are shut up in an English suburb and they work on each other.

At the beginning of the book Muriel is pregnant.

How can this be, as she never leaves the house?

Or, apparently not.

And that whole first book leads up to the birth of Muriel's baby

and the question implanted in the reader's mind,

"What on earth will happen when the baby is born?"

When Muriel Axon's child finally arrives,

her mother suggests that the baby is not a real human being at all

but a fairy changeling.

"'Look at it,' Evelyn said. 'You can't say it's human.'"

"'It might be a changeling.

"'If it is a changeling,

"'you ought to give some thought to getting the real one back.

"'The ones they take lead miserable lives.

"'They look in at people's windows.

"'Their growth's stunted. They're always cold.'"

"'It's a simple matter, Muriel.

"'You have to find some water, a river or something.

"'Float it along,

"'and sometimes they pick it up and give you your own back.'

"They waited on the bank for ten minutes.

"It was quite dark now.

"'It must be dead,' Evelyn said at last.

"'They won't give you anything for a corpse.'"

Every Day is Mother's Day, published in 1985,

and its sequel, Vacant Possession,

created Hilary's reputation

as an investigator of the darkness of the human heart,

reflecting the terror of living below consciousness,

of going down every day and every night

into the realm where the demons lie and the bodies are buried.

Critics began to wonder what the real Hilary Mantel was like.

Your house, your arrangements are really normal.

They're almost a deliberate attempt to be normal.

I try to organise daily life to be as boring as possible...

..because you need to lead a boring life,

if the contents of your head are very exciting.

You cant have instability in every area of your life.

And if your internal thought processes are full of horrors...

..then what you need in...

..everyday life is niceness.

You need blandness, security, safety and routine.

I don't believe it.

My daily life really is like that, as far as I can manage for it to be,

I'm a person who finds the world too much at every turn,

I have difficulty with noise, sometimes with bright light.

I have difficulty with people. I feel impinged upon.

I don't like too much conversation,

I like everything to be rationed,

so that my writing in my head can go on undisturbed.

So a very little excitement is quite enough for me

because the contents of my head are exciting.

From the publication of Every Day is Mother's Day

and for the next 20 years, Hilary was able to write full time.

She used her experience in Botswana to write A Change of Climate

and in Saudi Arabia to publish Eight Months On Ghazzah Street.

She also continued to work in historical fiction,

finally publishing A Place of Greater Safety in 1992

and then a disturbing account of the relationship

between the surgeon John Hunter and the Irish Giant O'Brian in 1998.

Then, in 2005, she put the two together

in a novel that was appropriately titled Beyond Black,

an unashamedly dark account of the permeable boundaries

between the living and the dead,

featuring the spiritualist medium Alison Hart.

I was writing about a medium,

for whom those borders are very uncertain.

That's not me. I thought, "Let's just exaggerate my position a little."

As it is, I have control over what I imagine

and I'm able to say to myself, "This is probably a hallucination,"

and, "This is probably real."

But when I was writing about the medium, Alison,

I was writing about someone who...

She's like a swinging saloon door, you know,

the dead just push through any time they like and she can't control it.

"Al talked about passing, she talked about spirit,

"she talked about passing into spirit world,

"to that eventless realm, neither cold nor hot,

"neither hilly nor flat, where the dead,

"each at their own best age and marooned in an eternal afternoon,

"pass the ages with sod all going on."

"Spirit world, as Al describes it to the trade, is a garden,

"or, to be more accurate, a public place in the open air,

"litter free like an old fashioned park,

"with a bandstand in a heat haze in the distance."

"Here, the dead sit in rows on benches,

"families together on gravelled paths between weedless beds."

"There's a certain 1950s air about the dead,

"or early '60s perhaps,

"because they're clean and respectable

"and they don't stink of factories,

"as if they came after white nylon shirts and indoor sanitation,

"but before satire, certainly before sexual intercourse."

"Damaged livers have been replaced,

"so their owners live to drink another day.

"Blighted lungs now suck at God's own low tar blend.

"Cancerous breasts have been rescued from the surgeons' bin

"and blossom like roses on spirit chests."

How much of this do you believe?

There's a division in my mind between what I believe logically

and what I believe out of experience.

Logic and reason tells me that...

..we don't have consciousness after death,

there IS nothing after death, there are no ghosts.

And certain known scientific laws are obeyed by all no matter.

But my experience suggests to me,

yes, there are ghosts and objects do move about

without human agency or mechanical means

and that the world is far stranger place...

..than we usually acknowledge.

What I think is that if I hadn't had an education...

..if I hadn't learned to think and put the brakes on fantasy,

then instead of being a novelist, I would pursuing Alison's trade.

I would be a professional psychic. I think that's quite a possibility.

You talk to the dead one way or another.

And you make it pay.

Financial success has enabled Hilary to live more comfortably

and from 2001 until earlier this year,

she lived on the edge of Woking, in a late Victorian building

that had previously been home to people

considered to be of unsound mind.

We're in a former lunatic asylum.

One of the hospitals built in the 1860s,

this great ring of asylums around London.

And this was a place that grew and grew.

It was a self-sufficient community.

As many of the hospitals were.

And it was actually converted about ten years ago,

since when I've lived here.

It's tempting fate I suppose, isn't it?

Do you know, it's not tempting fate,

what it is, it's teetering on the brink.

It's saying, "I can mix with the insane dead and they can't get me."

Actually it's singularly free from ghostly manifestations.

It's disappointing, in a way.

I did a lot of thinking about the relation of a place like this

to its own past and about history, as opposed to heritage.

About what the history people think they know.

And about memory.

This obsession with the past, buried historically and geographically

underneath the contemporary world,

became the catalyst for Hilary's next novel, Wolf Hall.

Told entirely in the present tense,

with the career of Thomas Cromwell at its heart,

Wolf Hall is a startlingly modern account of ambition,

survival and political intrigue in the 16th century.

I think it's a book that I was seeing as well as hearing,

as a sort of gold and black swirl

a kind of movement of darkness and light.

Something very glittery, something very much of another time

and so it was presenting itself at once through voices,

through image and drawing me on.

How do you know when you've done enough historical research to begin?

You don't.

Because I think when you're writing a particular scene

it may throw up a certain demand and you realise

you haven't got enough context.

You can't just have someone walk in

without them trailing their complete biography,

which, of course, the reader never sees but you may need to know.

So, for me, the duel processes, writing

and research are interwoven, so there isn't a line you can draw.

You don't know what you need to know until the moment comes.

I have files that go alphabetically, on people.

Just their biographical facts.

And then I have files of ideas and objects...

..customs and manners,

in which there might be anything from philosophy to cookery.

It goes, "Memory, money, Machiavelli, magic, medicine,"

and then, for some reason, it skips onto, "Palmistry, place, prophecies,

"Penshursts, round table, "Rome, 'sack of,'

"saint's days, tennis, Welsh, wardrobe and world views."

SHE CHUCKLES

I work from my notes onto the screen,

because my notes will evolve from being fact based

to being dialogue based.

They'll...shift themselves imperceptibly into drama.

But that's what I do.

I do dialogue.

So if you gave me the telephone book, I would make you a play out of it.

"He stands by a window.

"A flock of starlings settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree.

"Then, like black buds unfolding, they open their wings,

"they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion,

"air, wings, black notes in music."

"He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure,

"that something almost extinct, some small gesture towards the future,

"is ready to welcome the spring.

"In some spare, desperate way, he is looking forward to Easter,

"the end of Lenten fasting, the end of penitence."

"There is a world beyond this black world.

"There is the world of the possible.

"A world where Anne can be queen

"is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell.

"He sees it, then he doesn't. The moment's fleeting.

"But insight can't be taken back.

"You can't return to the moment you were in before."

The winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, 2009,

goes to Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall.

APPLAUSE

The power of the story

and the arresting individuality of the prose,

muscular, unsentimental and acutely observed,

made Wolf Hall a prize-winning success.

What was it like on the night for you?

The night of the Booker, what was that like?

Two of you go, the one who's going to win

and the one who's going to be the greatest loser

with a grin plastered on her face

I have had a lot of experience being the gracious loser...

so I made sure I was rehearsed in both roles.

'It was very undignified, really,

'because at the moment of the announcement,

'I shot to my feet as if I'd been fired out of a canon,

'as if not one more moment was going to go by.

'I should probably, you know,'

have had to be gently ushered to my feet by my friends.

It would have been more gracious.

But, yes, part of you thinks, "I've worked for this,"

and it is the ultimate recognition, the Man Booker,

that's what it's become

and, in a sense, it's something you want to get past.

Once you've won it, nobody thinks you ought to win it twice

and the pressure is off, in a sense,

so that you're waiting for that moment

and then you can start becoming the writer

that you meant to become all along.

This doesn't mean, however,

that the actual act of writing becomes any easier.

Hilary is now at work on the sequel to Wolf Hall,

The Mirror and the Light, and, in many ways,

it's like starting all over again.

I never take for granted that anything is going to come right,

so every day I'm writing, I feel like a beginner.

There are absolutely no guarantees

that because you could do it yesterday you can do it today.

You can always write something but sometimes you have to endure...

barren days, when you're just plodding across the terrain, going,

"Subject, verb, object, subject, verb, object."

It will actually carry you there and give you something to work on...

..but, at the time, it can feel like the end of the world

because you're going so slowly,

as if you've forgotten everything you've ever learned.

I do have faith that given enough input,

just given enough graft, eventually it will take off

and you'll see that fleeting shape of a section in front of you

and you'll be able to grab it, get it onto the page.

That's very like chasing the ghost.

It already exists, you see.

It's like the sculpture in the marble,

the ideal shape and form of the chapter exists,

you've just got to be there to grab it quickly.

Commencing in Wiltshire in September 1535,

The Mirror and the Light begins with the fall of Anne Boleyn

and the rise of Henry VIII's third wife, Jane Seymour.

Once again, Thomas Cromwell is at the heart of the novel.

He's the arch plotter and schemer.

I don't think he quite knows what schemes

he might be forming up around Jane.

He has a...a feeling about her that she's in some way important.

But...

..until, in the first chapter of the sequel,

he looks out of the window,

he sees the king walking with her in the garden.

And when Henry comes in, he's wearing an expression, I say,

rather like a calf that's just been stunned by the butcher...

And then Cromwell knows.

And on that moment, a great deal will pivot.

Henry doesn't know.

Jane does.

That's great fun, you know, trying to work out

the characters various levels of awareness.

And I think it's something to...

..always bear in mind.

Henry didn't know he was going to have six wives. We all know.

But he was hopeful with each one.

Each one was a fresh disaster waiting to happen in a different way.

But he had no perception of that.

We can look back and say, "Well, that one was doomed from the start."

But it is what historians can sometimes forget,

that people in the past...

..they could not adjust their behaviour

according to what was to come.

They could not draw morals from their own behaviour.

They were just sleep walking, they were walking into the dark.

And I think when you are a historical novelist,

your job is to walk with them.

Earlier this year,

Hilary and Gerald felt that they wanted a change of scene

and decided to move to the seaside, to Budleigh Salterton in Devon.

It was intended as the fulfilment of a childhood dream.

This is a photograph of Hilary on the beach at Budleigh,

taken when she was 16.

She has, perhaps at last, found a kind of peace.

Are you happy?

From time to time, yes.

It may sound like a superficial answer,

but it depends almost entirely on the last sentence I wrote.

If it was a good one, I'm happy.

If I'm plunged into uncertainty about that sentence,

I have to live with a lot of ambivalence

and ambiguity as to whether something is going to work,

whether my scene is going to work.

So I don't have the temperament that's ever going to be able

to stand back and say, "I am happy,"

cos I'm always going to say,

"Could be a bit happier, with a few adjustments."

But I am beginning a new phase of my life.

Because I'm going to live by the sea, which I've always wanted to do.

And...

..I'm hoping for a bit more inner calm.

I want to watch the sea

and learn from it.

Because the pattern is irreversible, irreducible.

There may be a storm blowing up

but basically you have the same...

waveform...coming and going.

It's almost as if I'm wanting to hear my own heartbeat.

I think that's what I'd like to be able to do.

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