They say favourites never win, but Hilary Mantel proved sceptics wrong when, at a ceremony at London's Guildhall onTuesday night, she won the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, her acclaimed novel about Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the Tudor court of the 1520s. According to the bookies Ladbrokes, more than 80 per cent of all Booker Prize wagers were placed on Wolf Hall, making it the most popular book in the £50,000 (Dh292,000) award's 41-year history. James Naughtie, the chairman of judges, called it "a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century. Wolf Hall has a vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail."
A delighted Mantel told the audience that although the novelist Peter Carey once compared winning the Man Booker to being in a train crash, "at this moment I am happily flying through the air". After the ceremony, Mantel laughed off suggestions that the persistent chorus predicting her win filled her with false hope that it might happen. "Having been a Booker judge [in 1990, the year AS Byatt won for Possession], I know that absolutely anything can happen in that final meeting. I don't think people appreciate how very tense it can be for the judges as well as the authors. You go in to fight for your book, and if you don't get your way you come out thinking: 'Did I do it right? Could I have said something different?'
"I have vivid memories of the final judges' meeting when I was a judge. I just know to take nothing for granted. I never for a moment thought being the favourite would weigh with the judges. In fact, I thought it might work in the opposite way. I thought they might get fed up with being told what to do." Mantel, 57, published her first novel, Every Day Is Mother's Day, in 1985, after she had returned to Britain after living in Saudi Arabia for four years. Since then, she has written nine novels, including A Place of Greater Safety (set during the French Revolution) and A Change of Climate, as well as a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. She lives with her husband in Woking, an unglamorous, far-flung suburb of London, on the top floor of a converted Victorian asylum.
She conceived the idea for Wolf Hall in the 1970s while working as a social worker in Botswana, but didn't feel mature enough to attempt writing it. "Sometimes you just have to put the idea away. It has to grow. You have to grow - you have to grow up. I couldn't back then have written a book about a seasoned, hardened political campaigner in his 50s. But now I'm a seasoned, hardened literary campaigner in my 50s, so I can do it!"
Kingsley Amis, who won the Booker for The Old Devils in 1986, spent his winnings on new curtains. Mantel says she plans to spend hers on "living". "It's earnings. That may seem a very cold way of looking at a major award, but if you cost out what an author earns per hour is far, far less than the minimum wage, especially when you begin, and I've been writing since 1974 and published since 1985. The return is not great. The money from prizes, welcome though it is, must just be aggregated. It must pay the mortgage, which authors have to do on their humble garrets."
Mantel's love for the Tudor period and its characters is so intense that she has already started work on a sequel. "For obvious reasons, I don't want to talk about a book I'm only halfway through writing because books can surprise you, but the sequel to Wolf Hall will be called The Mirror and the Light. We leave Wolf Hall in 1535. It's the evening of Thomas More's execution and Henry VIII is going on his holidays. I'm going to take up the book that autumn, when the royal party are at Wolf Hall in Wiltshire with the Seymour family - so for anyone who knows their Tudor history, alarm bells will already be ringing. The story will follow Cromwell's continued rise until he falls from grace and is executed in the summer of 1540."
She admits she hasn't made much progress with it. "What I've got at the moment is a huge box full of notes. Some of it strings together. Some of it is waiting to fall into place. So I don't know how long it's going to take to finish. How long is a piece of string? "Since Wolf Hall was published in the spring, I've been doing a lot of festivals, a lot of readings and so on. You can't work on a big fact-based book in a broken-up fashion. You need time to concentrate. I hope that time will come later this year."
Mantel has written at length about her poor health, especially the endometriosis from which she suffered in her 20s and which was for years - and with horrific results - misdiagnosed as depression. "I have had a great many health problems over the years. I don't make any secret of it. It has influenced my production of books and the rhythm with which I've written. I might be a couple of books on if I'd had better health. But I think that was one of the things about Wolf Hall. A book like that takes tremendous energy to push through. I hadn't got to the point where I felt I could put that energy behind it. Finally I did."
Was she conscious while writing Wolf Hall that it might be interpreted as a commentary on the contemporary political scene? "There's no deep, obscure allegory in the book about contemporary events. I think history is worth writing about for its own sake. We do a disservice to the dead if we use them as pasteboard figures through which we enact our contemporary dramas. Having said that, the subject matter remains relevant because the basic facts of the political process don't change. The exercising of power, the business of obtaining power, how it's lost - we're still in Machiavelli's world, which is where Thomas Cromwell was."
In the novel, Cromwell declares: "The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes." Mantel says: "What a novelist tries to do is junk the hindsight, junk the moralising, go back there and walk the road again. And that's really what I want my reader to do. I want them not necessarily to like Cromwell, not necessarily to sympathise with him, but I want them to walk in his shoes and see how the realities of Tudor politics looked from where he stood. I'm operating, if you like, on the frontier of the personal and political."
Wolf Hall is published by Fourth Estate.
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Engine: 1.5-litre turbo
Power: 181hp
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Transmission: 6-speed automatic
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Family: I have three siblings, one older brother (age 25) and two younger sisters, 20 and 13
Favourite book: Asking for my favourite book has to be one of the hardest questions. However a current favourite would be Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier
Favourite place to travel to: Any walkable city. I also love nature and wildlife
What do you love eating or cooking: I’m constantly in the kitchen. Ever since I changed the way I eat I enjoy choosing and creating what goes into my body. However, nothing can top home cooked food from my parents.
Favorite place to go in the UAE: A quiet beach.
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Juventus 1 (Dybala 45')
Lazio 3 (Alberto 16', Lulic 73', Cataldi 90 4')
Red card: Rodrigo Bentancur (Juventus)
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”