Congratulations to Hilary Mantel, who was awarded the 2012 Man Booker Prize for fiction on Tuesday. She became the first woman and first UK resident to win the Booker Prize twice.
She won with her book Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to her critically-acclaimed Thomas Cromwell history. The first installment of the trilogy, Wolf Hall, won the prize in 2009.
Two male authors won the Booker Prize twice: J.M. Coetzee from South Africa and Australia’s Peter Carey.
Mantel was awarded a check for £50,000 pounds and can expect a sharp jump in sales of her winning novel as well as her other work.
The prize shortlist included:
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
Umbrella by Will Self
The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
The Man Booker Prize for fiction was established in 1969, and “aims to promote the finest in fiction by rewarding the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.”
This year the judges “winnowed, sifted and culled” the list from 145 books, releasing a longlist of twelve finalists earlier this year, then a shortlist of six before the awards ceremony.
A reading sample from Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies can be found here, graciously provided by the New York Review of Books.
