'Wolf Hall' Wins Man Booker
By Liz Thomson -- Publishers Weekly, 10/6/2009 3:17:00 PM
Hilary Mantel, the bookies' odds-on favourite since the long list was announced, won the 2009 Man Booker Prize with Wolf Hall, set in the 1520s in the court of Henry VIII. The decision wasn't unanimous, but it was the majority verdict, arrived at after 90 minutes of "exhausting but exhilarating" discussion, chairman James Naughtie said. From the outset of yesterday's deliberations, it was a straight contest between Mantel and J.M. Coetzee with Summertime. Had the South African won the £50,000 prize, it would have been for the third time, and Mantel, a judge herself in 1990, was all too aware that "anything can happen."
The win was the first Man Booker triumph for Fourth Estate, which has fielded many other award winners including, of course, Carol Shields for the Orange and, just this year, Philip Hoare, who won the Samuel Johnson. HarperCollins UK CEO Victoria Barnsley, who founded Fourth Estate, was jubilant, particularly since this is the publisher's 25th anniversary. It also marked a good week for Bill Hamilton of A.M. Heath, Mantel's agent: the other news-making bestseller of the moment, Defence of the Realm, Professor Christopher Andrew's history of MI5, is also his.Wolf will be released next week in the U.S. by Henry Holt and the publisher has upped its print run from 40,000 copies to 90,000.
As the win was announced, a reprint of "at least" 65,000 was put in train. Already, there are 100,000 copies in print in all editions, 75,000 of them invoiced (this week Mantel's was the only Man Booker contender in the Neilsen top 100). Minna Fry, associate publisher of HarperPress, told BookBrunch that there will also be a "very special" leatherbound edition of 75 copies, signed and numbered, as well as "a really special" cloth-bound edition of 2,000 copies, also signed.
The judges described Wolf Hall as "a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century" with "a vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail." Accepting the award, the author said that she'd been working on the book, in the sense of thinking about it and preparing, for some 20 years (in the press conference which followed the ceremony, she in fact said since the 1970s) and had worried about how she might capture the imagination of a "jaded" public and reviewers looking for historical infelicities.
She needn't have worried, for Naughtie and his fellow judges (Professor John Mullan, Lucasta Miller, Sue Perkins and Michael Prodger) believed the novel "probes the mysteries of power by examining and describing the meticulous dealings in Henry VIII's court, revealing in thrilling prose how politics and history is made by men and women. In the words of Mantel's Thomas Cromwell, whose story this is, 'the fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes'."
Asked how she would spend the £50,000 purse, Mantel joked "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" before seriously pointing out that authors are by and large not well paid and that amortized out over all the years of research it didn't make her wealthy. But it was nice. If winning was like being in a train crash, "at this moment I'm happily flying through the air," she said.
