Hilary Mantel

Mantel grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family in Derbyshire and studied law before chronic pain, misdiagnosed for years as psychiatric illness, was finally identified as severe endometriosis; the surgery that followed left her infertile and, from the steroids prescribed afterward, permanently changed in body: an ordeal she recounted unflinchingly in her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. She spent years abroad in Botswana and Saudi Arabia while her geologist husband worked there, writing in near-total obscurity.

Her early novel of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, sat unpublished for years before finding a publisher after other books had made her name. She returned to historical fiction with Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), each winning the Booker Prize, making her the first woman, and first British writer, to win it twice, before completing the Cromwell trilogy with The Mirror and the Light in 2020. She died suddenly of a stroke in 2022.