Hilary Mantel repeats Walter Scott Prize success

It is the second time Hilary Mantel has won the prize

Hilary Mantel has won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for a second time.

The Mirror and the Light, the final novel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, has received the award 11 years after the first book, Wolf Hall.

She said she was "amazed and truly delighted" to win the £25,000 prize.

She will take part in a Borders Book Festival event later in the year to celebrate her win and mark the 250th anniversary of Walter Scott's birth.

The prize was set up in 2010 when Ms Mantel won the inaugural edition.

It is traditionally given out at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose in June but the event has been moved to November at Abbotsford House in the hope it can go ahead with fewer Covid restrictions.

The award is usually given out at the Borders Book Festival held in Melrose

Ms Mantel saw off works by Steven Conte, Kate Grenville, Maggie O'Farrell and Pip Williams to win the prize.

Judges said she had "achieved the almost unachievable" with a novel which closed a trilogy but could also stand "magnificently alone".

"With consummate technical skill married to the keenest ear for dialogue and the sharpest eye for rich and telling detail, Hilary Mantel resettles the reader at Thomas Cromwell's shoulder for a psychodrama that begins and ends with a blade," they said.

"The finale is both well-known and inevitable and yet - as the judges long pondered with astonished admiration - the suspense never fades."

'Years of effort'

The author said the prize had brought "great hope" to writers of fiction about the past.

"I'm so happy personally that The Mirror and the Light has won this recognition," she said.

"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."