“Over the years,” novelist Kazuo Ishiguro remarked at the Booker Prize ceremony last month, “what I’ve come to appreciate about the prize is when it shines a light on a career of a writer who has been writing very brilliantly but far from the limelight.”

In 2009, that light fell on Hilary Mantel. She was in her late fifties, Wolf Hall her 12th book, far from a household name. But then her Thomas Cromwell trilogy changed everything. Three years later, the next book, Bring up the Bodies, won her a second Booker. When the concluding title, The Mirror and the Light, was published in March, fans queued in the rain at midnight to get their copy.

Now 68, she is a star. The trilogy alone has sold 1.9 million copies in the UK, according to Nielsen BookScan. The first two books have been made into BBC TV adaptations, while the Royal Shakespeare Company’s version reached Broadway. The trilogy sets history charging at a pace. Mantel maps the rise of Cromwell from blacksmith’s son to one of the most powerful men in the court of Henry VIII. Weaving research and staggering imagination, her pacy present tense fashions the past anew.