Arts & Entertainment

Two-time Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel dies at 70

London, Sep 23 (EFE).- British author Hilary Mantel, who won the Booker prize twice, has died, her agent said on Friday. She was 70.

She passed away on Thursday surrounded by close family and friends.

“It is with great sadness that A.M. Heath and HarperCollins announce that bestselling author Dame Hilary Mantel died suddenly yet peacefully yesterday (Thursday),” her agent Bill Heath wrote in a blog post.

The author had won the prestigious award for two in her historical “Wolf Hall” trilogy.

Heath called Mantel “one of the greatest English novelists of this century,” whose “beloved works are considered modern classics.”

“She will be greatly missed.”

Mantel won the Booker Prize two times, for “Wolf Hall” in 2009 and its sequel “Bring Up the Bodies” in 2012.

The two acclaimed works were adapted for the stage and television.

The historical fiction “Wolf Hall” and two sequels centered around the 16th-century English powerbroker Thomas Cromwell, the right-hand man of King Henry VIII and a key figure in the history of the United Kingdom.

She was the first woman to win the Booker twice and only the fourth person to do so, after J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, and J.G. Farrell.

Mantel was born in Derbyshire, England, on July 6, 1952.

She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University.

She was a social worker and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s.

Mantel married geologist Gerald McEwen on Sep.23, 1972.

She is the author of 17 acclaimed books.

“We’ve lost a genius,” Harry Potter creator JK Rowling tweeted. EFE

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