Author Dame Hilary Mantel has died aged 70.
She was best known for her historical fiction series the Wolf Hall trilogy, which won her two Booker Prize awards.
"It is with great sadness that AM Heath and HarperCollins announce that bestselling author Dame Hilary Mantel DBE died suddenly yet peacefully yesterday, surrounded by close family and friends, aged 70," publishers HarperCollins said in a statement.
"Hilary Mantel was one of the greatest English novelists of this century and her beloved works are considered modern classics. She will be greatly missed."
She died in Devon, England, and her literary agent Bill Hamilton at AM Heath said it had been the "greatest privilege" to work with her. He confirmed that her cause of death was a stroke.
“She had so many great novels ahead of her,” Hamilton told the New York Times, saying that she was working on a novel at the time of her death.
“It’s just an enormous loss to literature,” he added.
The Wolf Hall trilogy follows the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell in the series, which features Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020). Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were Man Booker Prize winners.
To date, the trilogy has sold more than five million copies around the world and has been translated into 41 languages.
Mantel was born in Derbyshire, England, on July 6, 1952.
After studying law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University, she worked as a social worker, spending five years in Botswana and four years in Saudi Arabia. In the mid-1980s, she moved back to the UK.
In 1973, she married geologist Gerald McEwen. The couple divorced in 1981 but remarried in 1982.
She was awarded a CBE in 2006 and was made a dame in the 2014 Birthday Honours list for services to literature.
Scroll through the gallery below to see other stars we've lost in 2022 so far.
