On 23 September 2022, the publisher Fourth Estate announced that Hilary Mantel had died aged 70. This interview was first published in the New Statesman on 9 September 2021.
In the long, strange, stop-start months since The Mirror and the Light was published last March – the book came into the world minutes before the first lockdown began, which was both well timed, given its great length, and appropriate, given the contagions that stalked the reign of Henry VIII – I’ve often wondered about how its author came finally to kill off its central character. By then, after all, she’d been living with him for almost 15 years. Did she procrastinate madly, dread rising inside her like poison every time she approached her keyboard? Or did she just get on with it, determined her own cut would be swifter and neater – altogether kinder – than that of his real-life executioner, who reputedly did not quite manage to separate head from neck at the first attempt?
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