hello this is bbc news. the headlines this afternoon... kofi annan, the first black african to become un secretary general, has died. paying tribute, theresa may said mr annan made the world a better place. 300,000 people have been made homeless in southern india by the area's worst flooding for a century. rescue teams in the state of kerala are trying to reach those who are stranded. thousands of mourners have attended a state funeral in genoa for some of the victims of the motorway bridge collapse. ministers are considering introducing a new plastics tax for items such as takeaway boxes and coffee cups after a government consultation on how to reduce plastic waste received a record response from the public. more on the death of former un secretary general kofi annan at the top of the hour — but first booker prize—winning author dame hilary mantel is in conversation with rebecca jones

for talking books, recorded at the man booker festival on london's southbank. welcome to talking books at the man booker 50 festival here at the southbank centre in london. we've come to talk to dame hilary mantel, the only woman to have won the man booker prize for fiction twice for her bestselling historical novels wolf hall and bring up the bodies. her otherfiction may take you by surprise, with books about ghosts, the supernatural and the french revolution. the world, of course, eagerly awaits the next instalment of the thomas cromwell trilogy, the mirror and the light. hilary mantel, welcome

to talking books. we will come to the mirror and the light in due course. but i want to start with the books you have written. you have written 12 novels, short stories, a memoir, and i was very struck by how very different they are — from 800 pages on the french revolution to performing psychics in suburbia, your subjects are unpredictable. how deliberate is that? it's not really deliberate, it's just i don't know how people manage to write the same book over and over again, because you grow and you change, and your interests change. although to me there are subterranean threads that connect them, however disparate the subject matter may seem to be. i wonder if by resisting categorisation, did that potentially

prevent you building an audience earlier in your career? i think possibly it did. it is tempting for publishers and readers to want to put an author into a category. and to that extent they want to be served the mixture as before. and as you say, you couldn't predict when i was going to come up with next, and there's a mixture of the contemporary and the historical, which i agree is probably unusual. success, when it came in international recognition, fame, money, i presume, came relatively late in your career. did you feel you had been ignored up until then? i had always had good press, but not many sales. and that changed. as soon as wolf hall was published, actually, even before the prize short listings. and i felt i hadn't pushed out my talent to find where it might go. so i still felt like a work in progress. as you said, in many ways,

wolf hall was the turning point. career—wise, yes, it was a huge turning point. not only in domestic sales, but translations — and i think it went on to 36, 37 languages. and it is just amazing to think that people on the four corners of the earth are reading about henry viii and his wives. what you did was follow up with another man booker winner in 2012, didn't you, with bring up the bodies? yes. i did wonder how people's attitudes towards you change after those two victories. do you know, a lot of people thought they were my first books. and lovely, well—meaning people, would rush up to me and say, how wonderful you did all of this in your 50s. and i would feel a little bit sulky, because i would think, it you know, i have been writing since i was 22.

i wrote for 12 years before i was published. and that is a more typical career. but people love the idea of an overnight success. wolf hall and bring up the bodies, these books cover what must be one of the most famous periods in english history, the most talked about, the most written about. i think you said to me once that the topics are the british national soap opera, isn't it? what did you think you could add that was new? cromwell is vital to understanding the crucial ten years of henry's reign. and if you would stand where he is standing, this familiar material defamiliarises itself and becomes a much more complex and rich story than what we are used to from our schooldays.

it is the most remarkable career, and it is the arc of it. the son of the brewer, blacksmith from putney, rising to become the earl of essex. you have to ask yourself, how was that done? thomas cromwell, people say, that's an ingenious man. do you know he has the whole of the old testament by heart? do you know he has the whole of the new testament by heart? he is the very man of an argument about god breaks out. he's the very man for telling your tenants i2 good reasons why their rents are fair. he's the man to cut through some legal entanglement that has ensnared you for three generations. 0r talk your sniffling little daughter into the marriage she swears she will never make.

with animals, women and timid little ones, his manner is gentle and easy. but he makes your creditors weep. he can converse with you about the caesars, or get you venetian glassware at a very good price. nobody can outtalk him. if he wants to talk. nobody can better keep their head when markets are falling and weeping men stand in the street tearing up letters of credit. "liz," he says to his wife, one night, "i believe in a year "or two, we'll be rich." thank you. in the novels you challenge the traditional views of cromwell. he was always depicted as a villain but you make a somewhat more sympathetic character, even quite beguiling. so what was it that you discovered to contradict that traditional view? well, i discovered a lot of rubbish, really. errors and prejudices just being

kicked along from one generation of historians to the next. in many ways he deserves his reputation. he was ambitious and unscrupulous. he was hardheaded. but i think, no more so than the typical courtier of his time. he was a lot smarter. so it is your view the historians got it wrong? not all of them. it is interesting sometimes, to see what a novelist gets or takes away from a simple piece of documentation that a historian may not notice. but how historically accurate do you feel you have to be? i think you have to be absolutely accurate, as far as the record extends. but of course you have to be challenging the record,

and you have to be saying, who wrote this down, and what was his source of information? so in that sense you're getting behind the record. but i think in cromwell‘s case, certainly, you have to be very suspicious of secondary sources. you see, to the elizabethans, cromwell was a hero. by the time we get to the victorians he was a villain. so something happened at some stage in between, and he is a reflection, like most historical figures, of the times. we are not looking at him, we are looking in a mirror. you explain that very well. i think that is a very interesting point. how and when did you become interested in him? because you had wanted to write about him since the start of your career, hadn't you? i began work on a historical novel and i was very young, 22, not long out of university. and i really saw myself

as a historical novelist, and i thought, right, first i will do the french revolution and then i will turn my mind to thomas cromwell. and of course it doesn't work like that. no one's career is that smooth. and just as well, because i could write about the french revolution then, it was made by young men and women. i was younger than they were. mostly they were dead by their mid—30s. you were 22? i was in my 20s and 30s when i was working on the book. and i could recognise their spirit and their hope and their commitment and energy. i couldn't write that book now. but i can write about a man in his 50s building up and accumulating his life's experience. so i think, you know, the time when you get an idea for a book, that is not necessarily the time to execute it. sometimes you have to wait

a couple of decades and then pick your moment to strike. 2003, and your memoir, giving up the ghost, in which you write about your childhood, growing up in the ‘50s in northern england, but you also explain how you came to be a writer. that was not your original plan, you were going to be a politician and a lawyer. what happened ? yes, i was ambitious. ithink... it is difficult, you know? a woman from a working—class background with no connections trying to get into law at that time, i wasn't even interested in being a solicitor, i wanted to be a barrister. i wanted to come to london and the centre of things. it was difficult in those days.

but also i had health problems. i had an undiagnosed illness. but i was told that i was imagining it all. but by the time i was 21, i really had a sensation of doors closing on me. and a feeling that i was not going to be able to make a professional career, that my health was in my way, and so i thought, "well, i better have something that i am "in charge of." and i still had to work, of course. i still had a job but i started writing in the evenings, on the weekends, and i set my stall out for a big novel that i knew would take many years. but that is the beauty of being 22, because the time just stretches ahead of you. and i still had no connections and i didn't know anybody who was a writer. but what do you need? well, you need a piece

of paper and a pencil and you are ready to go. so you tell me that if you had not been ill, you would not have become a writer? i certainly would not have taken the decision at that precise time. i think possibly i would have made way way back to writing when i was living abroad, during which time i didn't have any meaningful career, so i think i would have come back to writing at a later stage. but that would not have been the same book, because it would have been a different self. yes. and of course you drew on your experiences in botswana and saudi arabia in novels that you did write. that is right. a change of climate. i wrote about southern africa — although at an earlier era — i wrote about it in the 19505. that was a historical novel of a kind. and then i wrote eight months on ghazzah street,

set in saudi arabia, reflecting my four years there. we've touched upon your illness, and as you said, it was undiagnosed for many years, and eventually you were diagnosed with endometriosis. that rendered you infertile. i was struck by a line in giving up the ghost. you wrote, "i miss the child i never had — what's to be done "but to write them into being?" is it fair to say you have created the children you never had in your fiction? it would be more fair to say i've created lives. they're more like a great tribe of brothers and sisters, i think. your people, your world. you realise that you only have one life to live and you want to try on for size all the other lives. and you want to move into different eras and you want to live in a man's body for a while and all these things that

writing enables you to do. you mentioned the french revolution — this epic 800 page novel which was finally published, a place of greater safety, although it was previously rejected by publishers, that must be difficult, was it? it seemed that someone who would write such a book must be someone of tremendous authority, someone we had heard of from oxford or cambridge. and it wasjust little me. and i don't think people could get their heads around it. they didn't know what it was. and thankfully, what i did, instead of turning around every publisher in london with it, ijust said, "stop, this "isn't the time, go away, write another book, do the best "you can, but make it completely different."

which was every day is mother's day. yes, a contemporary novel, short, funny. if that didn't take, i would have thought i was deluding myself and stop. but fortunately it did take. so the first decade, 12 years of my writing, was very rocky. my morale sank sometimes. i needed a lot of self belief to keep going. but once every day is mother's day hit the right desk, and that was the desk of the literary agent who still looks after me, everything went swimmingly. comparatively. yes. and finally, a place of greater safety was published. it was, and it won the sunday express book of the year prize. and i felt vindicated, in a sense. i mean, you started a huge epic about the french revolution. where does one start? well, manchester was my only choice. between the central reference

library and the university. there was a very good collection of material and i simply read everything i could get my hands on. i was short on primary sources but what i got were armfuls of gossipy victorian biographies. victorian—era biographies. which provided all the colour, the anecdotes, the personalities, and i built up from there. i've seen the binders and folders of research notes that you have, labelled ‘people', ‘places', ‘customs‘, ‘manners‘.

at what point as a writer do you say, "i've done "enough research now, i need to start writing?" well, to me, the two things are entwined. you know... you start them together, you run them together, and then until you come into a particular scene you may not know what you need to know. or it may be that some little piece of information that comes your way, and it need not be information, you might see a picture or hear some music, and it starts you off on a new trail. so you think, "right, this is the background "music to the scene. "i will write the song and we will sing it and change "the mood," you know? or you start to describe your event through describing a painting and it cuts through the complexities. and so you're always looking, not just for information from the historical record, but for a cultural context that will help you frame a scene. and i think that never stops. then, a little later,

came another completely different novel, beyond black. you mentioned at the beginning there are themes you return to in your books, and this theme of the supernatural is one of those. so where did this interest in a world beyond ours come from? probably from being brought up as a roman catholic. you're quite convinced that there is another unseen reality that is more potent than this one. and that this world is actually an illusion, something in which we are transitory and it doesn't really matter. what really matters is the world where the dead people are. and that was partly true to me as a small child. i think i lost a sense of it

as i grew up and moved away from the church. but that sense of another reality, sitting on your shoulder where your guardian angel is supposed to be, that's very powerful in my life. i really feel that the dead are only a whisper away. do you believe in ghosts? ghosts! i have to believe in ghosts. beyond black, which is a contemporary novel, and takes place mostly within the m25, is actually a kind of workup for the tudor novels, because it is all about the dead who won't lie down. the dead are on every page of that book, nattering away about all sorts of banal topics.

and the whole theme of talking to the dead and being available to them, i was actually setting the schedule for my next 15 years of work, but i didn't know it at the time. which brings us neatly to the mirror and the light, the eagerly anticipated final instalment in your thomas cromwell trilogy. so how is it going? it's going well. it has just suddenly taken a leap forward, and just last week i could email my editor and say, "since i emailed you last week, "i have done 12,000 words, and they are good words." 12,000 words is nothing, but you suddenly think, "now, "this project, it's pulling away from its moorings," you know? "it really wants to be written."

and i think i am probably entering into the most frenzied but also, in a way, the most pleasurable phase of the writing, where it seems to have taken charge and it is doing it itself. can you envisage a writing life beyond thomas cromwell now? there is so much i want to do. and notjust in prose but maybe in the theatre as well. and it is just a question of how much stamina have i got, what time have i got left? each project takes years to realise. so i have to have a long think. i have ideas for two or three more novels, and i am going to have to make some hard choices, i think. hilary mantel, thank you so much. today probably looking like the better of the two days this weekend overall. it is very humid and there

isa overall. it is very humid and there is a good deal of clown around. the best of the breaks for central and eastern parts of england and eastern parts of scotland as well. as we go into tomorrow, we have some outbreaks of rain. that is moving in from the west. through this evening and overnight, it will work its way east as we move through tomorrow. the remnants of tropical storm and stoke will bring some more persistent rain for a time and we will see some rain picking up. we will see some rain picking up. we will see some rain picking up. we will see cloud around and the breaks better in central and eastern parts of england. more cloud in the west and fit enough for outbreaks of drizzle. it is also cloudier in parts of central and southern scotla nd parts of central and southern scotland and northern england. there could be spots of rain and drizzle. it isa could be spots of rain and drizzle. it is a breezy day, particularly in the north—westward where we could see one 01’ the north—westward where we could see one or two the north—westward where we could see one 01’ two showers. the north—westward where we could see one or two showers. temperatures generally in the high teens on low 20s. generally in the high teens on low 205. a generally in the high teens on low 20s. a maximum of 2425 celsius with any good spell of sunshine. we are seeing some bright intervals and sunny spells developing for the cricket. temperatures around 23

celsius. it is feeling humid with eight south—westerly wind. will see bees outbreaks of rain spreading in from the west over northern ireland then central and southern scotland. further north of that both, there will be patches of most but it will allow temperatures to drop to single figures. further south, allow temperatures to drop to single figures. furthersouth, it will allow temperatures to drop to single figures. further south, it will be a fairly humid night. temperatures between 13 and 17 celsius. tomorrow we will see that framework is way east so slowly improving the picture. there will be brighter intervals in northern parts of scotla nd intervals in northern parts of scotland with one or two showers possible and cloud could be fit enough for drizzle in england and wales. there will be brighter intervals trying to develop and low cloud lingering on the western coast. temperatures are bit cooler today, a maximum of 23 celsius. as we move sunday into monday, that area of low pressure clears out towards the east. we still have that weather front grazing the far north

of scotla nd weather front grazing the far north of scotland and that will bring a bit more in the way of cloud and patchy outbreaks of rain. 0n bit more in the way of cloud and patchy outbreaks of rain. on monday, there will be patchy outbreaks of rain and drizzle, particularly the further north and west you are. the best of the brightness for central and eastern parts of england. the merger is a little warmer with more sunshine with highs of around 26 celsius in the south—east. this is bbc news. the headlines at 3pm. former united nations secretary general kofi annan dies aged 80 after a short illness — theresa may says he made the world a better place. 300,000 people are made homeless in southern india by the area's worst monsoon rains in a century. indian prime minister narendra modi has met senior officials to help co—ordinate the relief effort as further heavy rain is forecast. ministers plan a new plastics tax for items such as takeaway boxes and coffee cups after the public backs tough action in record numbers. we wa nt

we want to see esther are smart, intelligent incentives we can create to encourage the producers of plastic to take responsibility when they are designing the materials that