Lewes Live Literature Festival - Hilary Mantel

If you like your fiction as dark as bitter chocolate, nicely veined with a sometimes vicious sense of humour, you might enjoy Hilary Mantel’s most recent novel ‘Beyond Black’ (2005). She is coming to discuss it at the Lewes Live Literature Festival.

In a telephone interview for Viva Lewes, faced with a barrage of diverse questions from an eager but inexperienced interviewer, she responded with clarity, grace and goodwill.

The range of answers included her thoughts on the 1944 Education Act (it had a huge impact on her life because enabled her, from her working class 1950s background, to move up through the social classes), her experience of coming across child abuse as a social worker in the 1970s (when she reported it, no-one took it seriously, telling her, “No. He’s a decent bloke”), to her love of Paula Rego paintings (in which “people seem to be entranced, performing actions willed from outside and by huge impersonal forces”).

But the discussion started with, and returned to, her thoughts on Lewes. After several visits here over the last year, Hilary has grown to like the town very much. In fact she is using it as a backdrop to her latest work-in-progress ‘Wolf Hall’, a book about Thomas Cromwell. She said, “One of the nice things about Lewes is the recognition factor - people don't say “You mean Oliver?'” The novel will be set in Lewes at the time when Cromwell's son, Gregory, lived in a house built on the site of the flattened Priory with his bride Elizabeth (sister of Jane Seymour), until plague drove them out. Hilary says it will be a few years before ‘Wolf Hall’ is published because of the amount of research needed.