Authors Like Hilary Mantel

Robert Graves

British · Goodbye to All That (1929), I, Claudius (1934)

Graves was born in Wimbledon in 1895 and was badly wounded at the Somme; Goodbye to All That is his memoir of the First World War. I, Claudius and its sequel, Claudius the God, are narrated by the Roman emperor, a stammering scholar his family underestimated, and won the James Tait Black Prize. He died in Majorca in 1985.

Marguerite Yourcenar

Belgian-born French · Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), The Abyss (1968)

Yourcenar was born in Brussels in 1903 and lived most of her later life in Maine. Memoirs of Hadrian is written as a long letter from the dying Roman emperor to the young Marcus Aurelius. In 1980 she became the first woman elected to the Académie française. She died in 1987.

Robert Bolt

British · A Man for All Seasons (1960)

Bolt (1924–1995) was born near Manchester and worked as a schoolteacher before his plays reached the West End. A Man for All Seasons presents Thomas More as a man of conscience who dies rather than accept Henry VIII’s break with Rome, with Cromwell as his scheming opponent; Bolt’s screenplay for the 1966 film won an Academy Award. He also wrote the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago.

Muriel Spark

Scottish · Memento Mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918 and was received into the Catholic Church in 1954. In Memento Mori, elderly Londoners each receive an anonymous phone call telling them they must die; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie follows a teacher in 1930s Edinburgh and the girls she shapes. She died in Tuscany in 2006.

Every book by Muriel Spark →

Penelope Fitzgerald

British · Offshore (1979), The Blue Flower (1995)

Fitzgerald (1916–2000) published her first novel at 60 and won the Booker Prize with her third, Offshore, about people living on houseboats on the Thames. The Blue Flower follows the young German poet Novalis and his love for Sophie von Kühn, who was twelve when they met; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US.

Rose Tremain

British · Restoration (1989), Music & Silence (1999)

Tremain was born in London in 1943. Restoration follows Robert Merivel, a young doctor taken up by Charles II, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Music & Silence, set at the Danish court of Christian IV, won the Whitbread Novel Award. She was made a Dame in 2020.

C. J. Sansom

British · Dissolution (2003), Dark Fire (2004), Tombland (2018)

Sansom (1952–2024) was born in Edinburgh and worked as a solicitor before he began writing. Dissolution sends Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer working for Thomas Cromwell, to investigate a murder at a monastery in 1537; the series ran to seven novels, ending with Tombland. He died in April 2024.

Kate Atkinson

British · Life After Life (2013), A God in Ruins (2015), Transcription (2018)

Atkinson was born in York in 1951 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995). In Life After Life, Ursula Todd, born in 1910, dies and is born again many times, living through the Blitz in different versions; it and A God in Ruins both won the Costa Novel Award.

Every book by Kate Atkinson →

Maggie O'Farrell

Northern Irish-born British · Hamnet (2020), The Marriage Portrait (2022)

O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, in 1972 and grew up in Wales and Scotland. Hamnet imagines the household of William Shakespeare, never named in the novel, around the death of his son in 1596, and won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020. The Marriage Portrait follows Lucrezia de’ Medici in Renaissance Ferrara.

Lauren Groff

American · Fates and Furies (2015), Matrix (2021), The Vaster Wilds (2023)

Groff was born in Cooperstown, New York, in 1978 and lives in Florida. Matrix imagines the life of Marie de France, a twelfth-century poet sent away from court to run a poor English abbey, which she builds into a powerful community of women. Fates and Furies was a National Book Award finalist.