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LONDON — The British novelist Hilary Mantel won the 2012 Man Booker Prize on Tuesday night for “Bring Up the Bodies,” the second book in her planned trilogy about the life and machinations of Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII’s chief minister and master manipulator.

Set over the course of the year 1535, it tells of the initially triumphant and then fatally doomed reign of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, as seen through the eyes of Cromwell, who helped plot and orchestrate her dizzying downfall.

“You wait 20 years for a Booker Prize; two come along at once,” Ms. Mantel, 60, joked upon accepting the award. She also won the Booker in 2009, for the trilogy’s first book, “Wolf Hall” (she has yet to write the third).

On the sheer strength of “Bring up the Bodies,” which many critics thought was even better than “Wolf Hall,” Ms. Mantel was considered a favorite for this year’s prize. But in the Booker’s 43-year history, no one had won with a sequel, and no one had won so soon after winning the first time. Only two other authors — Peter Carey and J. M. Coetzee — have won twice.

The Man Booker Prize is awarded annually to a novel written by a citizen of the United Kingdom, Ireland or the Commonwealth. On Tuesday, much of literary London put on black tie and gathered for a formal dinner at the grand Guildhall to hear the winner announced; the BBC broadcast the moment live.

Other novels on the short list of six finalists included “The Garden of Evening Mists,” by Tan Twang Eng; “Swimming Home,” by Deborah Levy; “The Lighthouse,” by Alison Moore; “Umbrella,” by Will Self; and “Narcopolis,” by Jeet Thayil.

The list was memorable in part for what was left off, including novels by Martin Amis, Michael Frayn, John Lanchester and Pat Barker. Though two of the authors on the list, Ms. Mantel and Mr. Self, are very well known, the other four are not.

Mr. Self, one of Britain’s nimblest and most inventive writers, was also considered a favorite for the unconventional “Umbrella,” 400 pages of sharp, acrobatic stream-of-consciousness prose that uses four points of view to whisk the reader backward and forward through the 20th century, with no chapter divisions and few paragraphs. The judges called it “moving and draining,” and said that “those who stick with it will find it much less difficult than it first seems.”

Each of the finalists wins £2,500 (about $4,000) and a handbound edition of his or her book. The winner receives £50,000 (about $80,000) and traditionally a huge increase in sales.

Sir Peter Stothard, chairman of this year’s Booker panel, said the judges had based their choices on “novels, not novelists; texts, not reputations” — a signal that they looked at “Bring Up the Bodies” as a work on its own, without considering its predecessor.

The book — with language so intimate and immediate that some critics likened it to a fly-on-the-wall documentary of the Tudor period — received glowing reviews both here and in the United States. Critics praised Ms. Mantel’s ability to make a historically unsavory character come alive and seem wholly human, even sympathetic, and to infuse familiar historical details like the trial and execution of Anne with a sense of urgency and suspense.

The book, wrote Charles McGrath in The New York Times Book Review, “isn’t nostalgic, exactly, but it’s astringent and purifying, stripping away the cobwebs and varnish of history, the antique formulations and brocaded sentimentality of costume-drama novels, so that the English past comes to seem like something vivid, strange and brand new.”

Ms. Mantel is the author of a number of books on wildly different subjects. “A Place of Greater Safety” is set during the French Revolution and has Robespierre as one of its protagonists; “Beyond Black” is set in modern-day Britain and features a professional medium who is haunted by the dead people she cannot help seeing. Her memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost,” tells the harrowing story of her childhood and the health problems that have plagued her for years.