{"id":34587,"date":"2025-09-21T13:23:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-21T13:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/34587\/"},"modified":"2025-09-21T13:23:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T13:23:08","slug":"hilary-mantel-championed-emerging-writers-a-new-prize-in-her-memory-will-help-them-get-published-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/34587\/","title":{"rendered":"Hilary Mantel championed emerging writers – a new prize in her memory will help them get published | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few months after Hilary Mantel<\/a> died in\u00a0September 2022, the\u00a0novelist Maggie O\u2019Farrell was browsing in a bookshop. Stopping at a table of new novels, she\u00a0noticed a couple with Mantel\u2019s endorsement on the cover, which, she\u00a0tells me, she generally regards as instantly justifying the book\u2019s price. This time, though, \u201cI suddenly thought there aren\u2019t going to be many\u00a0more of these. It was such a sad moment. We\u2019re not going to get another Mantel book, and we\u2019re also not going to get to know about the books that she read and loved.\u201d<\/p>\n

To many readers who gobbled up Mantel\u2019s books \u2013 17 of them, including the novel Beyond Black<\/a>, and the Wolf Hall trilogy<\/a>, which won two Booker prizes \u2013 it\u2019s 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\u00a0other writers, especially those in the\u00a0crucial 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<\/a>, finally emerge in print in 1992.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019Farrell, will assess 15,000 words of a novel in\u00a0progress, and both winner and runner-up will receive not only money,\u00a0but mentoring from Mantel\u2019s literary agency, AM Heath; the publishing house John Murray; and the\u00a0creative writing charity Arvon<\/a>. O\u2019Farrell is joined by Mantel\u2019s editor of\u00a020 years, Nicholas Pearson; actor Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in the stage versions of the\u00a0Wolf Hall trilogy; and novelists Chigozie Obioma and Chetna Maroo, who both had their debut novels shortlisted for the Booker prize.<\/p>\n

Numerous writers attest to the difference Mantel\u2019s support made, especially early in\u00a0their careers<\/p>\n

When it comes to first-time writers, Mantel understood that this kind of support is crucial, says O\u2019Farrell. \u201cSomeone saying: \u2018This is good, keep\u00a0going, we want to see how you\u00a0finish it.\u2019 I think it will make an\u00a0enormous difference.\u201d<\/p>\n

Numerous writers attest to the difference it did make. Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist<\/a>, remembers a letter she received at the beginning of\u00a0her publishing life: \u201cIn early 2014, [Mantel] wrote such a warm note in her amazing handwriting, which I\u00a0have framed by my dressing table.\u201d She remembers \u201cbeing astonished because she was, and is, my literary hero. A few years later, she wrote to me\u00a0again, to say it was \u2018a treat to see you flourish\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miles sees the prize as the perfect way to celebrate Mantel\u2019s contribution to literature and to the lives of other writers and artists. \u201cIt\u2019s a\u00a0great way to honour her memory, and to cause me to recall how lucky I\u00a0was meeting her, working with her and ultimately writing with her,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt was a rare, rare thing, and something I\u2019ll treasure all my life.\u201d Mantel and Miles collaborated to write the stage play of the final part of the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light<\/a>, and on a book of photography<\/a> with Miles\u2019s brother, George, which was the last work Mantel published before she\u00a0died.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe adored talking to young writers,\u201d Miles remembers. When they were working on the stage plays, \u201cyou\u2019d see the cast of actors not quite know how to approach Hilary. Some were huge fans. Some had heard of her, but hadn\u2019t 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, \u2018Show me, let me see.\u2019 She was such a\u00a0collaborator.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book about rhetoric<\/a> 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. \u201cWe became good friends,\u201d Taylor says, \u201cand I introduced her to the children\u2019s mentoring charity Scene &\u00a0Heard<\/a>, in which inner-city kids write short plays for non-human characters, which are performed and directed by professionals. The children\u2019s words are not edited or changed in any way, and their writing is constantly funny, surprising and compelling. Hilary, of\u00a0course, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

That openness to other people\u2019s 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. \u201cAnd it\u00a0was really hard not to gush,\u201d he laughs. \u201cBut it was a genuine question; she wanted to know what we thought of what she was doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mantel was straightforward about her abilities and her ambitions. Possibly she felt false modesty to be a\u00a0form of inverted vanity, and she was highly attuned to the challenges of creating her fictional worlds and to the\u00a0intense effort \u2013 intellectual, emotional, logistical \u2013 that each project demanded. But although she\u00a0might occasionally have tended towards the aphoristic, even her pithiest advice opened up horizons. \u201cIf\u00a0you don\u2019t mean your words to breed consequences,\u201d she wrote in a piece for the Guardian<\/a>, \u201cdon\u2019t write at\u00a0all; the only tip you can give to a prospective writer is: \u2018Try to mean what you say.\u2019\u201d In practice, meaning what you say is harder than it looks, and Mantel\u2019s work was an extended elaboration of how it is done. In her 2017 Reith Lectures, she said: \u201cIn time, I understood one thing; that you don\u2019t become a novelist to become a spinner of entertaining lies, you become a novelist so you can tell the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

With this prize comes another chance for Mantel\u2019s generosity and her\u00a0lifelong commitment to the power of literature to make itself felt. \u201cBy\u00a0writing a novel one performs a\u00a0revolutionary act,\u201d she once wrote. \u201cA\u00a0novel is an act of hope. It allows us to imagine that things may be other than they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Hilary Mantel prize for fiction will be open to unpublished writers living in the UK and Ireland from Monday to 31\u00a0December 2025, and will be awarded in spring 2026. For more details visit hilarymantelprize.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few months after Hilary Mantel died in\u00a0September 2022, the\u00a0novelist Maggie O\u2019Farrell was browsing in a bookshop. Stopping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34588,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-34587","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}