How Hilary Mantel brings history to book And this is no bodice-ripping romp around the back corridors of Hampton Court, but a 560-page, densely plotted deconstruction of an era, told through the life of Henry's fearsome consigliere, Thomas Cromwell. Bring Up the Bodies, her contender for this year's prize, carries the story forward to the execution of Anne Boleyn, by which time Cromwell has become less of an adviser than the ultimate Tudor Terminator, up to his breeches in blood and self-torment. A final volume, The Mirror and the Light, is flagged for publication in 2014 - if Mantel is allowed the time to get on with it. Others complain that by picking on a period so ripe with intrigue as Henry's reign she is fuelling the soap-opera-isation of history. The author and historian Antony Beevor (while stressing that he hasn't read the Mantel novels) scoffs at "histo-tainment," and "faction-creep," and what he depicts as the tendency of novelists to shape supposed truths to fit their own preferences. In a New Yorker interview, Mantel rebuts this charge: "I cannot describe to you what revulsion it inspires in me when people play around with the facts. If I was to distort something just to make it more convenient or dramatic, I would feel I'd failed as a writer. She insists that everything in the novels is supported by historical research. Yet her Cromwell, one of British history's less endearing baddies, is strikingly sympathetic. Cromwell came from a tough background, spent much of his early life abroad, insinuated himself into the heart of the Tudor court, and became successful through his own wits, perseverance and hard work. Could the echoes of his life story be resounding through the author's own? She was born as Hilary Thompson in Glossop, Derbyshire (an edge-of-the-moors place of "distrustful and life-refusing" people, she complained in her memoirs), into a Catholic family of Irish descent. When Hilary was about eight her mother took a lover, Jack Mantel, who moved into the matrimonial bedroom, while her father was banished to the spare down the hallway. She believes the house was haunted, and as a child felt herself to be not only in mortal danger from the forces of the supernatural, but in a permanent state of sin. After her father finally disappeared - she knows not where, and never saw him again - she took Jack's name. She was a sickly girl whose illnesses pursued her well in into adulthood. At the LSE, she considered training as a barrister, but changed her mind and became a social worker. Then, aged 20, she married Gerald McEwen, a trainee geologist whom she had met through Catholic circles in her mid-teens. They went to work abroad, first in Botswana, then to Saudi Arabia, which she found "medieval," before returning to Britain. Hilary's health continued to torment her, and the consequences meant she was unable to have children. Mantel had begun writing books to mitigate the misery of illness - "I don't think I would have been a writer if I hadn't been ill," she has explained - and had considered writing about the Tudors for some time before starting work on Wolf Hall. She had doubts to begin with, but after completing the first page, "I was almost laughing to myself," she told the New Yorker. I was filled with glee and a sense of power, a sense that I knew how to do this. Words you can almost imagine coming from Cromwell himself.