Anecdotes

Mantel was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire before being awarded Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2014 Queen's Birthday Honors List for her services to Literature. Incidentally, she died two weeks after Queen Elizabeth.

She resided in the small seaside town of Budleigh Salterton in Devon.

She took her stepfather's surname, Mantel, after her mother re-married.

She and her husband Gerald McEwen divorced in 1981 but remarried in 1982.

After university she worked as a social worker at a geriatric hospital.

Wrote her memoir, Giving Up The Ghost, that chronicled years of ill-health, including undiagnosed endometriosis that left her infertile.

Won the prestigious Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall in 2009 and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies in 2012.

Studied at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University.

In the 1970s and 1980s she lived in Botswana and Saudi Arabia with her husband, Gerald McEwen, a geologist.