Hilary Mantel, Prizewinning ‘Wolf Hall’ Author, Dies at 70

King Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell, historically portrayed as an artless bully in the centuries before Ms. Mantel’s books, was reimagined in the “Wolf Hall” trilogy as perhaps the first great political power broker. 

Ms. Mantel’s unusual writing style within historical fiction—terse and contemporary, with flourishes of historical detail the English author spent years researching—earned much critical praise, including two Man Booker Prizes. The success of Ms. Mantel’s trilogy is often credited with reinvigorating sales and publisher interest in the historical-fiction genre.

“In that fidelity to the details of misery, one feels relish,” Ms. Mantel wrote in 2016 of giving writerly spark to dark pasts. “The grimmer it is, the better it is.”

In 2013, the Royal Shakespeare Company first mounted a stage version of “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” in Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare’s birthplace. Ms. Mantel first read Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” when she was 8 years old, she told the BBC, and was electrified by the violence of Caesar’s murder, the scene presaging her interest in bloody political machinations.

“It’s a handbook of political manipulation,” she said. “It sums up almost everything…that you need to know about the political process in a democracy or an autocracy.” 

The manipulation Ms. Mantel chronicled in “Wolf Hall” became a Bafta-winning and Emmy-nominated BBC miniseries in 2015, starring veteran stage actor Mark Rylance.