Hilary MANTEL wins inaugural Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

HILARY MANTEL’s Wolf Hall has won the inaugural £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for her 2009 Man Booker Prize-winning novel. The prize’s judges, including novelist Allan Massie and The Scotsman books editor David Robinson, said of Wolf Hall: “This is as good as the historical novel gets—immersive, engaging, beautifully crafted, and compulsively readable. Choose any superlative: it will fail this book. Mantel’s empathy for, and assimilation of, her world is so seamless and effortless as to be almost disturbing.”