Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel

The British author Hilary Mantel is known for her wickedly funny, anguished novels. She won the 41st annual Man Booker Prize on Oct. 6, 2009, for "Wolf Hall," a historical novel about Henry VIII's court centered on the king's adviser, Thomas Cromwell.

Ms. Mantel was the overwhelming favorite, with the bookmakers William Hill giving ''Wolf Hall'' odds of 10-11, the shortest odds ever for a nominee. She prevailed over the literary lions J. M. Coetzee and A. S. Byatt, both previous winners of the prize and became the first favorite to win since Yann Martel won for ''Life of Pi'' in 2002. The prize comes with roughly $80,000.

''Wolf Hall,'' published by Fourth Estate in Britain and Henry Holt & Company in the United States, was widely praised among reviewers. Writing in The New York Times on Monday, Janet Maslin said the book's ''main characters are scorchingly well rendered,'' adding that ''their sharp-clawed machinations are presented with nonstop verve in a book that can compress a wealth of incisiveness into a very few well-chosen words.''

Ms. Mantel, born in 1952 and the author of 10 novels, a collection of short stories and a memoir, spent five years writing "Wolf Hall" and is already working on a sequel.

Writing about herself, Ms. Mantel said: "I was born in 1952 in a mill village in Derbyshire, in the northwest of England. Most of my ancestors were poor, Irish and Catholic. My great-grandmother, who had 12 children, could not read. My grandmother left school at 12 to work in the mill. My mother left the school at 14 to work in the mill. She was an intelligent and beautiful woman who wanted better things for me, her first child. The village was a bleak place, dominated by gossip: harsh people in a harsh moorland landscape." Ms. Mantel would later write about Derbyshire in her novel "Fludd."

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