A few months after Hilary Mantel died in September 2022, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell was browsing in a bookshop. Stopping at a table of new novels, she noticed a couple with Mantel’s endorsement on the cover, which, she tells me, she generally regards as instantly justifying the book’s price. This time, though, “I suddenly thought there aren’t going to be many more of these. It was such a sad moment. We’re not going to get another Mantel book, and we’re also not going to get to know about the books that she read and loved.”
To many readers who gobbled up Mantel’s books – 17 of them, including the novel Beyond Black, and the Wolf Hall trilogy, which won two Booker prizes – it’s extraordinary that she found time or energy for anything beside the mammoth research that her vast historical enterprises entailed, not to mention her enthusiastic and detailed involvement in their various adaptations. But Mantel was an engaged and enthusiastic supporter of other writers, especially those in the crucial early stages of their careers. Perhaps she never forgot how long it took her to see the first novel she wrote, A Place of Greater Safety, finally emerge in print in 1992.
It’s fitting, then, that the award inaugurated in her name, the Hilary Mantel prize for fiction, should focus on recognising such promise. A panel of five judges, chaired by O’Farrell, will assess 15,000 words of a novel in progress, and both winner and runner-up will receive not only money, but mentoring from Mantel’s literary agency, AM Heath; the publishing house John Murray; and the creative writing charity Arvon. O’Farrell is joined by Mantel’s editor of 20 years, Nicholas Pearson; actor Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in the stage versions of the Wolf Hall trilogy; and novelists Chigozie Obioma and Chetna Maroo, who both had their debut novels shortlisted for the Booker prize.
When it comes to first-time writers, Mantel understood that this kind of support is crucial, says O’Farrell. “Someone saying: ‘This is good, keep going, we want to see how you finish it.’ I think it will make an enormous difference.”
Numerous writers attest to the difference it did make. Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist, remembers a letter she received at the beginning of her publishing life: “In early 2014, [Mantel] wrote such a warm note in her amazing handwriting, which I have framed by my dressing table.” She remembers “being astonished because she was, and is, my literary hero. A few years later, she wrote to me again, to say it was ‘a treat to see you flourish’.”
Miles sees the prize as the perfect way to celebrate Mantel’s contribution to literature and to the lives of other writers and artists. “It’s a great way to honour her memory, and to cause me to recall how lucky I was meeting her, working with her and ultimately writing with her,” he told me. “It was a rare, rare thing, and something I’ll treasure all my life.” Mantel and Miles collaborated to write the stage play of the final part of the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, and on a book of photography with Miles’s brother, George, which was the last work Mantel published before she died.
“She adored talking to young writers,” Miles remembers. When they were working on the stage plays, “you’d see the cast of actors not quite know how to approach Hilary. Some were huge fans. Some had heard of her, but hadn’t read the books. But she was such a wonderful presence in any room, and over the weeks, the actors would feel that they could approach her more and talk to her about the work. Occasionally, one of the actors would mention something that they were writing, be it a TV series or a novel or a book about rhetoric for actors and directors. And Hilary would say, ‘Show me, let me see.’ She was such a collaborator.”
The book about rhetoric was co-written by director Philip Wilson and the actor Giles Taylor, who played Archbishop Cranmer in the stage version of The Mirror and the Light. “We became good friends,” Taylor says, “and I introduced her to the children’s mentoring charity Scene & Heard, in which inner-city kids write short plays for non-human characters, which are performed and directed by professionals. The children’s words are not edited or changed in any way, and their writing is constantly funny, surprising and compelling. Hilary, of course, loved it. As soon as the performance was over she marched up to the artistic director and demanded to be a patron, which she duly became. Within a month of getting involved she had personally rung the then culture secretary and insisted he came along, which he did. Nobody turned down the redoubtable dame.”
That openness to other people’s work went both ways: Miles also recalls Mantel sending him and his brother extracts from The Mirror and the Light as she was writing it. “And it was really hard not to gush,” he laughs. “But it was a genuine question; she wanted to know what we thought of what she was doing.”
Mantel was straightforward about her abilities and her ambitions. Possibly she felt false modesty to be a form of inverted vanity, and she was highly attuned to the challenges of creating her fictional worlds and to the intense effort – intellectual, emotional, logistical – that each project demanded. But although she might occasionally have tended towards the aphoristic, even her pithiest advice opened up horizons. “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences,” she wrote in a piece for the Guardian, “don’t write at all; the only tip you can give to a prospective writer is: ‘Try to mean what you say.’” In practice, meaning what you say is harder than it looks, and Mantel’s work was an extended elaboration of how it is done. In her 2017 Reith Lectures, she said: “In time, I understood one thing; that you don’t become a novelist to become a spinner of entertaining lies, you become a novelist so you can tell the truth.”
With this prize comes another chance for Mantel’s generosity and her lifelong commitment to the power of literature to make itself felt. “By writing a novel one performs a revolutionary act,” she once wrote. “A novel is an act of hope. It allows us to imagine that things may be other than they are.”