Culture
06 Sep 21

'Wolf Hall' author Hilary Mantel to seek Irish citizenship

The 69 year old novelist said she hopes to "become European again".

Novelist Hilary Mantel, who wrote the hugely popular Wolf Hall series, has been hoping to leave the UK and gain Irish citizenship.

According to an Italian newspaper called La Repubblica, Mantel has said that she might "breathe easier in a republic," also saying that the monarchy's popularity is baffling to her. "I hope to loop back into my family story and become an Irish citizen," she said.

"Our projected move has been held back by Covid, but much as I love where I live now, in the West Country, by the sea, I feel the need to be packing my bags, and to become a European again."

Mantel grew up in Derbyshire and won the Booker Prize for Bring Up The Bodies, the second in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. She has said that her Irish ancestry is deeply influential for her.

"My parents were both born in England, but the generation that shaped me was the one before that, and I was conscious of belonging to an Irish family," she said.

"We were northern, working-class and Catholic, and to me, Englishness was Protestant and southern, and owned by people with more money. So when I began writing I imagined myself as a provincial writer, in the good sense, and as a European writer, rather than an English writer."

Mantel also described the UK as an "artificial and precarious construct", saying that as a child she was sheltered from the history of the "other parts of these islands."

"Wales and Scotland were only mentioned when the English were fighting battles there," she said. "They were destined to be conquered, and added on to the more important territory, their complex histories dwindling into childish narratives consumed by tourists.

"I have always been alive to the way that the word 'England' is used to include the other nations, a habit that says everything about underlying attitudes."

Mantel spoke out strongly against Brexit in 2016, and joins John Le Carre, the author of several spy novels, who gained his Irish citizenship shortly before his death in December of 2020.