Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel, with her book Wolf Hall, a tale of intrigue in the court of King Henry VIII.Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel, with her book Wolf Hall, a tale of intrigue in the court of King Henry VIII. (Alastair Grant/Associated Press)

Wolf Hall, a vividly told tale of Tudor intrigue by Hilary Mantel, has won the Man Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in English literature.

Mantel, a favourite going into the awards ceremony Tuesday evening in London, takes home the equivalent of $85,600 Cdn and a guaranteed surge in book sales.

In Wolf Hall, Mantel chronicles a turbulent period of Tudor history through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith's son who rises to become one of the King Henry VIII's most trusted advisers.

Cromwell emerges as a complex character who plays a key role in Britain's Reformation.

A political genius and ruthless in support of his own interests, he is a mover in Henry VIII's court, orchestrating the king's marriage to Anne Boleyn and the break with Rome.

"He was a blacksmith's son who ended up Earl of Essex," Mantel told the BBC. "So how did he do it? That's the question driving the book."

Mantel said she finds the Tudor period fascinating, because it has the stuff of great storytelling.

"It has sex and melodrama, betrayal seduction and violent death. What more could you hope for?" she said.

The judges agreed Mantel caught all those elements in Wolf Hall.

"From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics," the Booker judges said.

"With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage."

Mantel, 57, was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, England, and studied law at university. She lived in Botswana for five years and in Saudi Arabia for four years before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s.

She was film critic for The Spectator from 1987 to 1991. She is working on a sequel to Wolf Hall.

With files from The Canadian Press