Dame Hilary Mantel, the author of the best-selling Wolf Hall trilogy, died Friday at the age of 70, her publisher confirmed.

“We are heartbroken at the death of our beloved author, Dame Hilary Mantel. Our thoughts are with her friends and family, especially her husband, Gerald. This is a devastating loss and we can only be grateful she left us with such a magnificent body of work,” her publisher said in a statement.

Her cause of death is not known.

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Who was Hilary Mantel?

Mantel, whose birth name was Hilary Mary Thompson, was born in Glossop, Derbyshire. She was the eldest of three children, and raised as a Catholic in the mill village of Hadfield. She attended St Charles Roman Catholic Primary School.

Her parents were both of Irish descent but born in England.

Mantel’s first novel, Every Day is Mother’s Day, was published in 1985, and its sequel, Vacant Possession, a year later.

The British writer won the Booker Prize twice, for 2009’s Wolf Hall, the first in the Thomas Cromwell series, and the 2012 follow-up Bring Up the Bodies.

She was the first woman and fourth person to receive the award twice, following J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey and J. G. Farrell.

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The third instalment of the Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was released in 2020 in the UK. It became a fiction best-seller and was longlisted for The Booker Prize 2020.

Wolf Hall was a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in the court of Henry VIII.

Mantel married geologist Gerald McEwen in 1973. They divorced in 1981 but remarried in 1982. McEwen gave up geology to manage his wife’s business.