How bestselling author almost made Cork her home

IT’S hard to believe a year has already ed since the death of writer Hilary Mantel.

She died on September 22, 2022, and I was on holiday in Italy when I heard the news.

Like those big public deaths – JFK, Elvis Presley, John Lennon – I can picture the moment vividly. A steep, narrow cobbled street in Scalea, a seaside town about two hours south of Naples. My partner’s phone pinged with someone forwarding the news.

There was disbelief at first, as there always is with sudden death. There was the added alienation of being away, even though we scoured the newspapers online and read all the tributes.

Even so, it was still hard to take in that, only two weeks previously, Hilary had emailed me to say that she was on her way. On her way to Kinsale, that is, where she and her husband, Gerald, had bought a house and were to start a new life.

They’d been looking for some time to move to Ireland, and a sale in Clonakilty had already fallen through at the last minute. Then they found Kinsale.

The main motivation for the move to Ireland was the fall-out from Brexit. Hilary wanted to “become a European again”. In an interview with La Repubblica in September, 2021, she added: “I might breathe easier in a republic.”

But it was also a desire “to loop back into my family story”. Her maternal great-grandmother, Catherine O’Shea, came from Portlaw, Co Waterford, and had emigrated to Hadfield, a textile town in the Peak District, where Hilary was reared.

The Irish Catholic influence was very strong in her childhood. 

“As a small child, I grew up in what was essentially an Irish family, surrounded by Irish people who were old.”

It was a double association with Ireland. Her husband, Gerald, was already an Irish citizen, through his mother who had grown up in Warrenpoint, Co Down.

My reading relationship with Hilary Mantel goes way back, long before the Wolf Hall trilogy, which turned her into a two-time Booker prizewinner and a household name.

I picked up her third novel, Eight Months On Ghazzah Street, published in 1988, for no other reason than I liked the cover. I knew nothing about her as a writer but I was immediately hooked.

Based on Mantel’s own experience of living in Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s, the novel tells the story of s Shore, whose husband is on contract there. s is disturbed by the restrictions of the Saudi way of life; she is not allowed to drive and she can’t walk alone in the city without being harassed.

Even in s’ own apartment there’s a constant reminder of the oppressive burden of the female life in the Middle East. The front door is walled up, a legacy of the last occupant, a Saudi woman who had to be protected from accidentally encountering a male neighbour on the corridor outside.

I loved this novel and avidly read the rest of her work. I felt I was part of a small cult following of Mantel’s wry and bracing intelligence, her unflinching eye, the absolute emotional conviction of her writing.

When the rest of the world discovered her via Wolf Hall, I have to it to a tiny twinge of resentment that finally one of my reading “secrets” was out.

Hilary was at work on the third book of the trilogy, The Mirror And The Light, at a time when I was associate director of creative writing at UCC, and it struck me what a dream gig it would be (for me, mostly!) to invite Hilary to Cork to read.

For four years in a row, I’d email her in August when we were organising the schedule of readings for the academic year. She always dealt with me personally and there was always a cheerful reply, inquiring after my own work, and signed “Love, Hilary”. Her refusals were always gracious and work-related.

In 2016, she was still wrestling with The Mirror And The Light (which took eight years to complete); in 2017, she was taken up with the BBC Reith Lectures which had eaten into her novel-writing time; in 2018, her mother died. Don’t lose patience with me, she wrote, I really want to make this happen. (Not least because of her and Gerald’s plans, which she’d shared with me, to become permanent residents here.)

Finally, the date for her reading was set – May 19, 2020. The hall was booked – the Aula Maxima at UCC – and the ticket portal set up. We began to crank up the publicity, and then Covid happened.

At the time, we thought we could rearrange the reading within a few months, but protracted lockdowns put paid to that. For the time being, our correspondence petered out.

Then in late summer, 2022, I read in The Guardian that Hilary’s move to Ireland was imminent. I wrote saying if she’d found a place near Cork, she’d have to come to our place for tea and buns.

Her response was immediate and enthusiastic; “Put the kettle on - we’re coming to Kinsale!”

And so here we are a year later, and she is coming to Kinsale, in a way.

As part of the Words By Water 2023 festival, I’ll be ing Hilary Mantel as a writer and a literary friend. My only wish is that she’d be standing on the podium beside me.

Literary Friendship: ing Hilary Mantel. Saturday, October 7, 12-1pm at the Methodist Church, Kinsale

The full programme for Words By Water, from October 5-8, is available at wordsbywater.ie, with all events open for booking.

For people who want to make a weekend of it, a €50 festival covers entry to everything except workshops.