Hilary Mantel has won the Costa Book Award of the Year for Bring up the Bodies.
It saw off contenders: Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner (the children’s book winner), The Innocents by Francesca Segal (the first novel award), The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie (the poetry prize) and Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary and Bryan Talbot (winner of the best biography award, and the first graphic work to win a Costa prize).
Mantel collected the prize fund of £30,000.
Mantel’s win means that she has also secured a ‘literary treble’: Bring Up the Bodies has won the Booker Prize, the Costa Novel Award and Costa Book of the Year. This achievement is worthy of this extraordinary book. I can’t improve on Tudor historian Nicola Shulman’s Spectator review:
‘Was he [Thomas Cromwell] the originator or just the executor of the plot, acting on the King’s instructions? This is where we look to Mantel.
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