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Hilary Mantel has won 2009's Man Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall. It was "not a unanimous decision", head judge James Naughtie admitted last night, "but we were all content with the decision". He added: "What we wanted to avoid at all costs was some kind of compromise." The judges were split 3-2 between Mantel's Wolf Hall and another book, which he declined to name.
But the media has widely backed the decision. "Rarely has the Booker Prize got it so gloriously, marvellously right as this year," the Times enthused this morning. In her account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power from blacksmith's son to the righthand man of Henry VIII, Mantel has changed "that hoary old genre [historical fiction] for ever and redrawn its contours".
At the Independent, Boyd Tonkin said the judges had "rewarded a genuinely outstanding novel". He added: "If Wolf Hall achieves the near-impossible task of rescuing the Tudor court saga from cliché and melodrama, it also slots neatly into a body of work that looks shrewdly behind the robes and the words of the mighty.
On picking up the £50,000 award at the ceremony at London's Guildhall, the author said she was "happily flying through the air".
The win will come as no surprise to the bookies, who had Mantel leading the pack since the shortlist was announced a month ago. The Bookseller reported that Mantel had become the first ever odds-on favourite in the race to win the Man Booker prize: Ladbroke's was offering odds of 8/13, while at William Hill she was placed at 10/11. The last time the favourite won was 2002, when Yann Martell's Life of Pi (Canongate) took home the prize.
This is the first time Fourth Estate has been a Booker-winning publisher.
Naughtie described Wolf Hall as "a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century" and commended its "vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail".
Mantel has previously won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for Fludd, the Sunday Express Book of the Year award for A Place of Greater Safety and the Hawthornden Prize for An Experiment of Love.