Hilary Mantel has revealed how her childhood was marked by a reluctance to speak, in a provocative essay in which she urges writers that “if you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all”.

Writing in the new issue of Index on Censorship’s magazine, Mantel, who has won the Man Booker prize twice for her historical novels set around the life of Thomas Cromwell, says her muteness was “prolonged … to the point of enquiry: ‘Doesn’t she talk, what’s wrong with her?’”, and that “throughout childhood I felt the attraction of sliding back into muteness”.

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