Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky has apparently already been sent the manuscript for Hilary Mantel’s long-awaited sequel The Mirror and the Light – and the work of adapting it for TV has begun.


But Piers Wenger, the BBC’s Drama Controller, said he still had no idea when the drama will make it to our screens.

At a press event in London, he commented: “I can’t say that now. Genuinely I think we are engaged in those conversations around getting [co-writer] Peter Straughan, Peter Kosminsky, getting the cast back together.”

Mantel’s hotly-anticipated historical novel will be published on 5th March, finally completing the trilogy that began with Wolf Hall (2009) and continued with Bring Up the Bodies (2012).

Back in May 2019, the BBC announced plans to adapt The Mirror and the Light as a sequel to Kosminsky’s Golden Globe-winning 2015 mini-series Wolf Hall.

The director used the first two novels in the trilogy as the basis for a six-part drama set in the Tudor court, starring Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell, Damian Lewis as King Henry VIII, Anton Lesser as Sir Thomas More and Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn.

A sequel has been on the cards for years, but the project has been in limbo until Booker Prize-winner Hilary Mantel was ready to send over a preview of her manuscript.


It is now two weeks before its release date, and Wenger said Kosminsky had in fact been sent the book – “but it’s only fairly recently. He’s writing at the moment, and he’ll write across this year,” the TV exec told press.