Bookenders in West Cork as Hilary Mantel joins David Mitchell as neighbours
From Wolf Hall to West Cork bungalow: Author Hilary Mantel when winning the 2009 Man Booker prize for her historical fiction novel 'Wolf Hall' is to become a West Cork resident following in footsteps of Cloud Atlas Booker-nominated writer David Mitchell
Talk about a high-pressure book club – a West Cork village can now boast of not just one, but two world-renowned literary writers with Booker prize links as ‘locals’ - Hilary Mantel and David Mitchell.
Two-times Booker prize winner and writer of historical fiction Hilary Mantel, who won in 2009 for Wolf Hall, and again in 2012 for a sequel Bring up the Bodies was in West Cork this week, concluding a swift house purchase.
She and her husband Gerald McEwan have been staying in Dunmore House Hotel overlooking Inchydoney, concluding the €710,000 purchase of a 23-year old four-bed bungalow, with a sweep of wild Atlantic ocean.
Ms Mantel, aged 69, has lived and worked from Devon for a number of years producing highly acclaimed works, many garlanded in awards: she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to literature in 2014.
She has had over 1.5 million print book sales of what grew to a lengthy trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light, also booker-nominated) on the life and times of Thomas Cromwell, a minister to Henry Vlll. She has Irish ancestry on both sides, but grew up in Cheshire in the UK and has not previously been connected to West Cork where she’s now due to set up home.
Ms Mantel spoke last year about her desire to leave the UK saying she feels "ashamed" by the government's treatment of migrants and asylum seekers.
Speaking last September, the author said she intended to become an Irish citizen to "become a European again".
In response to a question about British Home Secretary Priti Patel’s rhetoric on migration and asylum seekers and whether it marks the “ugliest side of the new ‘global Britain’ post-Brexit”, the writer told Italian publication, La Repubblica: “It was my grandparents’ generation who were immigrants [from Ireland]; sometimes my life gets confused with my fiction, because a number of my characters have Irish parents.
“We see the ugly face of contemporary Britain in the people on the beaches abusing exhausted refugees even as they scramble to the shore. It makes one ashamed.
“And ashamed, of course, to be living in the nation that elected this government, and allows itself to be led by it.”
Neither the property’s selling agent, Henry O’Leary, nor the property’s vendors, would confirm Ms Mantel as the next occupant of the ‘sale agreed’ property.
Ms Mantel and her geologist husband Gerald will become West Cork neighbours of twice Booker-nominated prolific writer David Mitchell, whose 2004 novel Cloud Atlas and the 2001-published number9dream each made the Booker prize shortlist, while his metafictional Cloud Atlas was also filmed, in 2012.
UK-born David Mitchell bought a modern home in West Cork in 2018, where he lives full-time with his Japanese-born wife Keiko Yoshida and their two children. He has been a guest author previously at the Bantry West Cork Literary Festival, and has also lived in Italy, and Japan.
*This article was amended on 11 May
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