Hilary Mantel: A Life in Writing

This event took place on 24 October 2023. The information below is correct as of the publication date.
Although Hilary Mantel died in 2022 and is much missed, her inimitable voice lives on: sharp, often very funny, always luminous Join us as we launch her final book A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing. This collection of her journalism, lectures, literary criticism and personal writing, much of it in first person, stands powerfully alongside Hilary’s remarkable novels, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it.
In an evening hosted by Alex Clark, fellow writers including Sarah Perry celebrate Hilary Mantel and her achievement, with readings by Lydia Leonard who played Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall on stage.
Her subjects in A Memoir of My Former Self are wide-ranging. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life flopping into our conscious life; her family and past lives, the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels - revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England; literature and films reviews, and published for the first time, her stunning Reith Lectures, which explore the process of art bringing history and the dead back to life.
Hilary Mantel was the bestselling author of many novels including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the Wolf Hall Trilogy, was also awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award. She also wrote A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O'Brien, Fludd, Beyond Black, Every Day Is Mother's Day, Vacant Possession, and a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Mantel was the winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books.