Main content

What makes Hilary Mantel’s writing so good?

For Radio 4's Word of Mouth, Michael Rosen speaks to two-time Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel about her life in writing. While discussing her Thomas Cromwell series of novels (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light) she reveals a host of fascinating influences and devices that shape her work.

Here are eight pieces of Hilary's wisdom that we have bookmarked...

Listen to the full interview here

1. Hilary says she came to writing late

Though the library in the village where she grew up was poorly stocked, Hilary read anything she could find, including books by Enid Blyton, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Brontës. Although she feels that she came to writing late, after leaving university, by then, Hilary says, “I had read enough novels and I was confident enough that I knew how to write one.”

No book is perfect for every reader and that’s important to know if you’re going to be a writer.
Hilary Mantel

2. Biblical language stuck with her

Hilary’s Catholic upbringing definitely shaped her later writing career. The parallel translation of the Latin mass she read in church was, she says, “elevated language… not your everyday chit-chat and not a big jump from that to the language of Wolf Hall. This is what I grew up with – it was language in my blood if you like.”

3. She knows you can't please everyone

Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was the first "grown up" book that Hilary read while still a child. She describes the experience as “like eating a whole box of chocolates at once”. Although she considered that the story was “overblown”, she realised then that “no book is perfect for every reader and that’s important to know if you’re going to be a writer.”

4. She uses the present tense

Parting with the tradition of writing a novel in the past tense, Hilary’s work has both feet in the present. Using the scene in Wolf Hall where Thomas Cromwell is beaten up by his father, Walter, as an example, she says, “Where were we? We were behind Thomas Cromwell’s eyes. When were we? We were now. It’s unfolding like a film, which always unfolds in the present tense.”

5. She carefully includes "alien" words

Her reading of Tudor documents has helped Hilary become fluent in the language of historical fiction. “You don’t want the language to hold readers up but… what you can do is suggest, every so often, an alien way of thinking and you can use rare words, words you don’t hear nowadays, as long as the meaning is evident from the context.”

Some examples of these rare words and phrases include: “gouts of blood” (drops of blood); waffeting (floating); and the spices galingale and cassia.

Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel: "You have an inner voice where the perfect novel is kept."

A clip from Word of Mouth: Hilary Mantel in conversation with Michael Rosen.

6. She reads her work out loud

Hilary describes herself as a fast writer and someone more preoccupied with getting content right than style, which comes easily for her. Nevertheless, she wants “everything to gleam” and will take time out to read passages aloud, “because if you do that then you hesitate over anything that’s not right.”

“Sometimes it’s a question of going into a sentence and finding a synonym that’s got one less syllable or has the stress in a different place – and you wonder why it’s taken me some time to produce this third book?!”

7. The dialogue is her favourite part

Hilary thinks that she should have been a playwright because dialogue is her favourite thing to write, and she has a very particular approach to writing it: “I am always aiming to have several goes at it and to get it down by at least a third from the first draft, and sharpen and sharpen it.”

8. She leaves space for a miracle

After years of writing, Hilary says the process is “like starting a song: the rhythm won’t falter; the internal logic of the prose won’t let you down.” She recognises, however, that there is “a fine balance between exerting absolute control and simply letting go so the thing can happen. A daily miracle – that’s what you’re aiming for!”

To hear the full interview, listen to Word of Mouth: Hilary Mantel in conversation with Michael Rosen.

More from Radio 4