Mantel says The Mirror and the Light – the sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies – may not be published until 2019

Hilary Mantel’s hotly anticipated final instalment to her Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall trilogy is unlikely to appear next summer, the author said this week. Responding to a question from the audience in her latest Reith lecture for the BBC, she said it was “increasingly unlikely” the book would be published in 2018 as she had previously hoped.

The novel, which completes the story of Henry VIII’s doomed right-hand man Thomas Cromwell, will be titled The Mirror and the Light. The first two books in the trilogy – Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies – both won the Man Booker prize, making Mantel the first author to win for consecutive books.

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Asked about the final instalment, Mantel said: “It simply depends when it comes in … you know, publishing goes in seasons. If I can get it [finished] early in the new year, it might very well come out in later summer. But I have to say that this is looking increasingly unlikely.”

The book may not appear until 2019, said Mantel, who denied that her failure to finish the novel to schedule was a sign of reluctance to write about Cromwell’s execution in July 1540. “People ask me if I’m having trouble killing off Thomas Cromwell. No, why would I?”

Fear of disappointing fans of the trilogy appears to be the main cause of her slow progress on the novel, which will cover the period from Anne Boleyn’s execution in 1536 to Cromwell’s fall from power four years later. “It is 10 years’ worth of effort and it is lovely to have the encouragement of people who are waiting for it, but that’s why I want to deliver them something that is the very best,” she said.

Wolf Hall was published in 2009 and Bring Up the Bodies in 2012. The books have been successfully adapted to television and stage. The Mirror and the Light is expected to follow suit, with Mark Rylance set to reprise his award-laden role as the doomed chancellor who rose from Putney butcher’s son to chief architect of Henry VIII’s schism with Rome.

“As soon as [Cromwell is] dead, he will get up, put on his head again and charge on to the TV screen … and quite possibly there will be another stage play. So it’s simply a way-station on his road to triumph,” Mantel said.

The novels have been criticised and lauded in equal measure for providing an alternative portrait of Cromwell, one of the most controversial figures in British history. As well as engineering the split with Rome, he plotted Boleyn’s fall from grace after she failed to provide Henry with a son, and was responsible for the torture and execution of Catholic dissidents including Sir Thomas More.

In the Reith lecture, the penultimate in a series that has explored the factual hinterland of historical writing and novelists’ and playwrights’ responsibilities, the author admitted that her view of the chief protagonist of Wolf Hall was provocative, but added: “My tendency is to approach the received version with great scepticism and try to get the reader to challenge what they think they know.”

Mantel has written a number of historical novels using real-life figures. Her 1992 novel A Place of Greater Safety focuses on the French Revolution and the lives of George Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Maximilien Robespierre, the notorious architect of the Reign of Terror. In 1998, she published The Giant, O’Brien, a novel about the Irish giant Charles Byrne and the Scottish surgeon John Hunter.

Of her approach to historical fiction, Mantel said: “You’re always looking for the untold story, you’re looking for what has been repressed politically or repressed psychologically. You are working in the crypt.”