Saturday, July 13, 2013, 2:00 p.m., San Leandro Main Library — Arrange Your Face and Be There

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Biographical information about Hilary Mantel from her Harper Collins page:

• Born in northern Derbyshire in 1952. 
• Educated at a convent school in Cheshire.
• Went on to the London School of Economics and Sheffield University, where she studied law. 
• Briefly was a social worker in a geriatric hospital, and much later used her experiences in her novels Every Day is Mother's Day and Vacant Possession. 
• Went in 1977 to live in Botswana with her husband, then a geologist. 
• Moved on in 1982 to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where she would set her third novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.
• Published first novel in 1985. Returned to the UK the following year..
• Awarded the 1987 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing, and became the film critic of the Spectator. 
• Reviews widely for a range of newspapers and magazines, and is currently working on the sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, to be called The Mirror and the Light.

Other novels and awards:

• Fourth novel, Fludd, was awarded the Cheltenham Festival Prize, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, and the Winifred Holtby Prize.
• Fifth novel, A Place of Greater Safety, won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award.
• A Change of Climate, published in 1993, is the story of an East Anglian family, former missionaries, torn apart by conflicts generated in Southern Africa in the early years of Apartheid. An Experiment in Love published in 1995, is a story about childhood and university life, set in London in 1970. It was awarded the Hawthornden Prize.
• Beyond Black, published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, while Wolf Hall won the 2009 Man Booker Prize, and Bring Up the Bodies, its sequel, won the 2012 Man Booker Prize.

If you have time, scroll down and take a look at the four prior posts here on subjects relevant to Wolf Hall and the times of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. In particular, I would point your attention to the post of June 9 and the link to the sound file and transcript in the London Review of Books in which Hilary Mantel discusses "Royal Bodies" and the public's obsession with royal females as arbiters of fashion and as dynastic brood mares.

Beverly also pointed me to an interview of Hilary Mantel on "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, which aired on November 26, 2012.