Mantel pieces

For the teenage girl from Derbyshire, the school trip to Budleigh Salterton was a life-changing experience.

Standing on a cliff, looking down at the white houses of the Devon seaside town, she felt as if she was suddenly in the Mediterranean. One day, she promised herself, she would make it her home. Forty years later, thanks to the enormous popularity of her books, she realised her dream. 

The road to success was not easy. It took her five years to write her first novel, A Place of Greater Safety, inspired by studying the French Revolution. "For teenagers," she said, "the idea of sudden transformation - for fairly obvious reasons - is extremely interesting; and the idea of rising up against a despoticTyrannical or using unlimited power over others in a cruel way. regime. At that age, you naturally understand revolution."

But historical fiction was out of fashion in the 1970s. Publishers rejected the novel; one of them lost part of the only copy. To make things worse, Mantel was diagnosed with endometriosisAn abnormality of the uterus, causing chronic pain and infertility. - a painful condition which would overshadow the rest of her life.

Discouraged, she put the book aside. It was finally published 13 years later, after she had written four other novels.¹ It was a huge critical success.

Even then, she was far from becoming a household name. A further 17 years passed before Wolf Hall changed that.²

Based on the life of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son who rose to be Henry VIII's chief adviser, it won the 2009 Booker PrizeOne of the most high-profile literary prizes for novels in the English language.. Three years later, its sequel Bring Up the Bodies caused a sensation by winning the Booker as well. Stage and TV versions of the two books made her more famous still.

"The grace and vigour of these gripping novels transformed our understanding of what historical fiction can do," Dinah Birch wrote in The Conversation. In the Daily Telegraph, Sarah PerryAn English author whose work has been translated into 22 languages. declared that reading Mantel's writing was like sitting "beside a hanging tapestry, hearing the executioner sharpen his axe".

The Guardian's Charlotte Higgins wrote that Mantel opened up an extraordinary world, making you feel that you had been in touch "with someone who picked up frequencies unnoticed by most of us".

According to the education expert Sir Ken Robinson, imagination "is what fundamentally sets us apart from the rest of life on earth... you can revisit the past, you can enter into other peoples' consciousness empathetically - you can imagine what it would be like to be them - and you can anticipate the future".

Is imagination what makes us human?

Yes: No other creature can imagine what it is like to be someone completely different, work out what might happen in the future or make up wonderful stories in the way that we can.

No: Other creatures also have imagination - you only have to watch dogs to realise that they have dreams when they sleep, and anticipate being fed. What makes us human is our superior intelligence.

Or... Imagination may not be exclusive to humans, but it is our most important trait. Ken Robinson also emphasises the importance of creativity, which he calls "putting your imagination to work".