Booker win boosts 'Wolf Hall'

Hilary Mantel was a critically praised but commercially lukewarm novelist, whose Tudor corridors-of-power saga "Wolf Hall" was receiving rave reviews for its vivid depiction of 16th-century England.

Then she won the Booker Prize, the career-changing literary award that attracts attention from bookies and bookstores alike. Overnight, she shot up best-seller lists in Britain and the United States.

Now, says a bemused Mantel, "I'm chasing Sarah Palin on Amazon."

The $82,000 prize is a huge boost for a book that turns the historical figure of Thomas Cromwell - Henry VIII's shadowy political fixer - into a compelling, complex literary hero. Cromwell was an architect of the Protestant Reformation who helped the king realize his desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The Vatican's refusal to annul Henry's first marriage led the monarch to reject the authority of the pope and install himself as head of the Church of England.

Henry's reign has inspired fictional treatments from the acclaimed play and film "A Man for All Seasons" to the soapy TV series "The Tudors." It's a dramatic era that saw England transformed from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant nation, from medieval kingdom to emerging modern state.

"It's one of those periods of history that is so good you couldn't make it up, really," Mantel said.

"I think it's the parade of the archetypes. We've all known people like these. We've all known some kind of saintly wife like Catherine of Aragon, whose career is wife as well as queen and who will hang on to a dead marriage. We've all known someone like Anne Boleyn, the mistress on the make. We've all known men like Henry - clinging onto his youth, denying that he's getting fat, denying that he's going bald."

Mantel's Cromwell more than holds his own against these larger-than-life figures. One of history's great self-made men, he left home at 15 and fought as a mercenary in the French army before learning the workings of Italian banks and Low Countries cloth markets. When he returned to England, he became a prosperous lawyer and finally a powerful political player.

Mantel said Cromwell is fascinating because he went from "blacksmith's son to Earl of Essex, in this incredibly rigid, stratified, hierarchical society."

How did he do it?

"I think it's the kind of story that's just got a universal quality about it," she said. "He's the boy who leaves home and can't go back. He's got to go forward. You find those people in every society, at every time. And some of them are smarter and harder than the rest, and they break through."

Sitting in her agent's London office less than 48 hours after the Booker win, 57-year-old Mantel was sleep-deprived but still buzzing. She says she's "taking it half an hour at a time."

A softly spoken former social worker and film critic, Mantel has written novels, short stories and the memoir "Giving Up the Ghost"- which chronicled years of ill-health, including the undiagnosed endometriosis that left her infertile. She has said the years of illness wrecked her dream of becoming a lawyer, but made her a writer.

Her nov

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