Mantel's first novel, ''
Every Day Is Mother's Day,
was published in 1985, and its sequel, Vacant Possession, a year later. After returning to England, she became the film critic of The Spectator'', a position she held from 1987 to 1991, and a reviewer for a number of papers and magazines in Britain and the United States. Her third novel,
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), drew on her life in Saudi Arabia. It features a threatening clash of values between the neighbours in a city apartment block to explore the tensions between Islamic culture and the liberal West. Her
Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize-winning novel
Fludd (1989) is set in 1956 in a fictitious northern village called Fetherhoughton, centering on a Roman Catholic church and a convent. A mysterious stranger brings about transformations in the lives of those around him. Mantel was a Booker Prize judge in 1990, when
A.S. Byatt's novel
Possession was awarded the prize.
A Place of Greater Safety (1992) became
The Sunday Express Book of the Year, an award for which her two previous books had been shortlisted. This large-scale historical novel, informed by scholarly knowledge, traces the career of three French revolutionaries,
Danton,
Robespierre and
Camille Desmoulins, from childhood to their early deaths during the
Reign of Terror of 1794.
A Change of Climate (1994), partly set in rural
Norfolk, explores the lives of Ralph and Anna Eldred, as they raise their four children and devote their lives to charity. It includes chapters about their early married life as missionaries in
South Africa, when they were imprisoned and deported to
Bechuanaland, and the tragedy that occurred there.
An Experiment in Love (1996), which won the
Hawthornden Prize, takes place over two university terms in 1970. It follows the progress of three girls – two friends and one enemy – as they leave home and attend university in London.
Margaret Thatcher makes a cameo appearance in this novel, which explores women's appetites and ambitions, and suggests how they are often thwarted. Though Mantel used material from her own life, it is not an autobiographical novel. Her next book, ''
The Giant, O'Brien'' (1998), is set in the 1780s, and is based on the true story of
Charles Byrne (or O'Brien). He came to London to earn money by displaying himself as a freak. His bones hang today in the Museum of the
Royal College of Surgeons. The novel treats O'Brien and his antagonist, the Scots surgeon
John Hunter, less as characters in history than as mythic protagonists in a dark and violent fairytale, necessary casualties of the
Age of Enlightenment. She adapted the book for
BBC Radio 4, in a play starring
Alex Norton (as Hunter) and
Frances Tomelty. In 2003, Mantel published her memoir,
Giving Up the Ghost, which won the
MIND "Book of the Year" award. That same year she brought out a collection of short stories,
Learning To Talk. All the stories deal with childhood and, taken together, the books show how the events of a life are mediated as fiction. Her 2005 novel,
Beyond Black, was shortlisted for the
Orange Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2005. Novelist
Pat Barker said it was "the book that should actually have won the Booker". Set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it features a professional
medium, Alison Hart, whose calm and jolly exterior conceals grotesque psychic damage. She trails around with her a troupe of "fiends", who are invisible but always on the verge of becoming flesh. The long novel
Wolf Hall, about
Henry VIII's minister
Thomas Cromwell, was published in 2009 to critical acclaim. The book won that year's
Booker Prize and, upon winning the award, Mantel said, "I can tell you at this moment I am happily flying through the air". Judges voted three to two in favour of
Wolf Hall for the prize. Mantel was presented with a trophy and a £50,000 cash prize during an evening ceremony at the
Guildhall, London. The panel of judges, led by the broadcaster
James Naughtie, described
Wolf Hall as an "extraordinary piece of storytelling". Leading up to the award, the book was backed as the favourite by bookmakers and accounted for 45% of the sales of all the nominated books. The sequel to
Wolf Hall, called
Bring Up the Bodies, was published in May 2012 to wide acclaim. It won the
Costa Book of the Year and the
2012 Man Booker Prize; Mantel thus became the first British writer and the first woman to win the
Booker Prize more than once. Mantel was the fourth author to receive the award twice, following
J. M. Coetzee,
Peter Carey and
J. G. Farrell. This award also made Mantel the first author to win the award for a sequel. The books were adapted into plays by the
Royal Shakespeare Company and were produced as a
mini-series by
BBC.
The Mirror & the Light was selected for the longlist for the 2020 Booker Prize. In 2014, Mantel published a collection of 10 short stories,
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which
The Guardian called a "flawed but absorbing selection" singling out the story
Sorry to Disturb for praise.
The New York Times described the collection as having "narrators much more outwardly meek and inwardly turbulent than the murderous royals and puppeteers so beloved in her historical fiction". The controversial title story is about an assassin who disguises himself as a plumber and takes over an apartment opposite the hospital where the Prime Minister is undergoing eye surgery. The woman who owns the apartment, and who is in effect a hostage, turns out to be surprisingly sympathetic to the assassin's cause. She was also working on a short non-fiction book, titled
The Woman Who Died of Robespierre, about the Polish playwright
Stanisława Przybyszewska. Mantel also wrote reviews and essays, mainly for
The Guardian, the
London Review of Books and
The New York Review of Books.
The Culture Show programme on
BBC Two broadcast a profile of Mantel on 17 September 2011. In December 2016, Mantel spoke with
The Kenyon Review editor David H. Lynn on the KR Podcast about the way historical novels are published, what it is like to live in the world of one character for more than ten years, writing for the stage, and the final book in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy,
The Mirror & the Light. Her final one of these lectures was on the theme of adaptation of historical novels for stage or screen. Mantel's lectures were selected by its producer, Jim Frank, as amongst the best of the long-running series. At the time of her death in 2022, Mantel was working on a new novel which was characterized as a "mash-up" of Jane Austen novels. == Personal life and death ==