Kate Mosse said Dame Hilary (pictured) was "a classic writer, but living in our modern times"
Dame Hilary Mantel: Rowling, Mosse and Evaristo lead tributes to late author
Authors JK Rowling, Kate Mosse and Bernardine Evaristo have led the tributes to Dame Hilary Mantel, saying she changed the face of literature.
23 September 2022
Dame Hilary, author of the best-selling Wolf Hall trilogy, died on Thursday aged 70, her publisher confirmed.
She won the Booker Prize twice, for 2009's Wolf Hall, the first in the Thomas Cromwell series, and its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies.
"We've lost a genius," tweeted Harry Potter writer Rowling.
The president of the Royal Society of Literature, Evaristo said she was "so sorry" to hear the news and that she felt "so lucky to have such a massive talent in our midst".
"I met her a few times and she was always so warm, down-to-earth and welcoming. RIP," the fellow Booker Prize-winning author said.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's The World at One programme, Labyrinth author and founder of the Women's Prize for Fiction, Kate Mosse, said Dame Hilary "changed the face of how modern readers saw historical fiction".
"She was a very great writer... she kind of just had this exquisite way of capturing a place in a time within three sentences," Mosse said
Pointing to her other, earlier works, Beyond Black and Everyday is Mother's Day, as well as her "searing" memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, Mosse went on to describe Dame Hilary as "a writers' writer" who "became one of the most important readers [that] writers could have".
Mosse continued: "The thing about Hilary Mantel was that she was a woman of extraordinary principle, she said what she thought, she wrote what she thought, she believed in the idea that your writing was your soul, if you like, out there.
"And she was unaffected by whether these views were popular or they were out of fashion, or she should do this or she should do that."
Mosse concluded: "She was a classic writer, but living in our modern times, and she will be remembered like George Eliot and [Charles] Dickens - I have no doubt that her works will never go out of print."
Bill Hamilton, Dame Hilary's agent at literary agency A.M. Heath, told the same programme that her work, in both historical and contemporary fiction, always gave "a sideways look, the sense always that the present was a place of complete uncertainty and danger that you never knew what was around the corner".
"I think that sense of what lay in the Gothic, which was a kind of other universe lurking just slightly behind what you saw, infuses almost everything that she writes," he said.
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