Award-winning author, critic, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at King’s College London, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His first book, The Invention of Angela Carter received the Somerset Maugham Award.. [Link
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28501482-the-invention-of-angela-carter ]
In the Times Literary Supplement review of Mantel’s The Mirror and The Light Edmund wrote:
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‘Hilary Mantel’s novels about Thomas Cromwell are full of bad marriages – between Henry VIII and his first two wives, the Catholic church and the English state, the English people and the English ruling class – but they spring from a heaven-made marriage between author and subject. Mantel has reimagined one of the least beloved figures in British history as one of the most extraordinary men of his age, and the age itself as a sort of horse-drawn gangsters’ paradise: a world of extreme brutality, where untold rewards are available to those with the strength and guile to go out and take them. In Mantel’s hands, the story of the Tudors loses all its heavy familiarity and starts to feel like a custom-built vehicle for her muscular prose and savage wit, not to mention her lifelong concern with violence and evil, religion and ghosts.
At the Wolf Hall Weekend, Edmund will share his insights into the unique Mantel style of prose.
‘Crucial to Mantel’s achievement is her refusal either to censure or sentimentalize the past. She doesn’t foist twenty-first-century values and beliefs onto her characters, but seeks to engage with them in all their pre-scientific, pre-democratic, God- fearing strangeness. Her language is wiry and precise, and not at all cod-Tudor, though from time to time she does deploy some vaguely sixteenth- century cadences (“the web of treason is sticky in the palm, and leaves its bloody smear”), and the imagery is often heightened for spine-tingling effect (“Katherine’s miscarried children, their blind faces and their vestigial hands joined in prayer”). Likewise, the jokes, which are good and frequent, don’t depend on any cheap tricks with historical perspective, but are things that the characters themselves can (and often do) laugh along with. These may be negative virtues, but it’s amazing how few historical novelists manage to attain them, and Mantel has access to all the corresponding positive virtues as well. She conjures the sensual texture of the sixteenth century, its tastes (surprisingly varied) and smells (surprisingly pleasant), and makes even her characters’ most extreme actions and beliefs seem entirely natural to them. The result is some of the most complex and immersive fiction to have come along in years.’
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