Hilary Mantel, 1952 – 2022

Hilary Mantel has died at the age of 70. She became the first-ever winner of The Spectator/Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing in 1987. Mantel wrote for The Spectator as its film critic until 1991. She went on to win the 2009 and 2012 Booker Prize for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Below is Hilary’s prize-winning piece on Saudi Arabia; the judges ‘particularly admired her ability to convey not only the discovery of a culture new to her but also the distaste which the discovery aroused’, said then-editor of The Spectator Charles Moore.

Last Morning in Al Hamra

Hilary Mantel

There are children, frail and moribund, who live inside plastic bubbles; their immune systems have not developed, and so they have to be protected from the outside world, their air specially filtered, and their nourishment — you cannot call it food – passed to them through special ducts, by gloved and sterile hands.