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Hilary Mantel can add the £40,000 David Cohen Prize for Literature to her award cabinet after winning the lifetime achievement accolade last night (7th February).
Meanwhile it has emerged that actor Mark Rylance will play Thomas Cromwell in the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.
The David Cohen Prize, which recognises the work of an entire career and has been previously awarded to Seamus Heaney and Julian Barnes, can now be added to Mantel¹s list of recent awards including the Costa Prize and two Man Booker prizes for Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.
Mantel, an essayist and short story writer as well as a novelist, said the David Cohen award recognised her 28 years of striving to perfect her craft as a writer. "There are some readers who think that I was born on the day Wolf Hall was published. This prize acknowledges that there are no overnight sensations in the creative arts," Mantel said. "That's not the way it works. The ground has to be prepared and I feel that this is recognition of the fact that for many, many years I¹ve been trying to perfect my craft. I want to assure the judges that much as there is a lifetime's worth of work behind me, there is still a lifetime's worth of work still to come."
At a gala ceremony hosted at the British Library, Mark Lawson chair of the judges, was ready to defend any suggestion that Mantel had been given "too much too quickly" in regard to awards. He said: "It seems paradoxical that giving a major literary prize—the British Nobel Prize, as I think of it—to one of the most generally admired and well-liked people in the literary world will be, for some, controversial. This is because of a feeling voiced by some pundits and perhaps secretly thought by authors who feel unrewarded that Hilary Mantel has recently been given too much too quickly. That issue, however, was rapidly dismissed by the judges.
"Crucially, while the writer's other recent prizes have been for two recent books, the David Cohen Prize assesses and rewards an entire career to date. In the case of Hilary Mantel, this means 28 years of work that has produced 13 books ranging across historical and contemporary novels, short stories and a memoir."
Meanwhile actor Mark Rylance will play Thomas Cromwell in the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, according to a Daily Mail report.
The actor is said to have initially turned down the role because of a crowded schedule, but the drama's producers were willing to wait for over a year until he becomes available to film this time next year.