Celebrated British writer Hilary Mantel, best known for her Thomas Cromwell trilogy—Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light—for which she won not one but two Booker Prizes, died from a stroke on Thursday at the age of 70, The New York Times reports.
“She had so many great novels ahead of her,” Mantel’s agent Bill Hamilton told the Times. “It’s just an enormous loss to literature.” That is certainly true—it’s hard to think of many other writers so widely celebrated, read, and beloved, whose works have become genre-defining classics in a little more than a decade. Now is a very good time to revisit the great books she has left behind her, and if you’re so inclined:
Read Hilary Mantel on how writers learn to trust themselves.