Hilary Mantel has won the Walter Scott Prize . . . again.
In a satisfying full-circle moment, Hilary Mantel has won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction with her novel The Mirror & the Light, the third book in her Booker Prize-winning, Thomas Cromwell-centered Wolf Hall trilogy—eleven years after Wolf Hall won the first-ever Walter Scott Prize.
The judging panel praised Mantel’s “consummate technical skill,” “keen ear for dialogue” and “sharp eye for rich and telling detail,” and acknowledged the excitement of her double win: ‘in 2010, Wolf Hall bowled the Walker Scott Prize judges clean over. This year The Mirror & the Light did the same. How lucky we are to live in the age of Hilary Mantel.”
“I’m so happy personally that The Mirror & the Light has won this recognition,” said Mantel herself. “It was certainly the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I know the author isn’t always the best person to judge, but it seems to me to be the strongest of my trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell. It launched the trilogy in fine style when the first volume Wolf Hall won the Walter Scott Prize, and now this rounds off the many years of effort.”
[h/t The Bookseller]
