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Two-time Booker Prize winner Dame Hilary Mantel and renowned historian and broadcaster Professor Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch talk about their different perspectives on the 16th-century lawyer and statesman Thomas Cromwell. During this event, MacCulloch, vice-president of the British Academy with responsibility for public engagement, will present the 2016 British Academy President’s medal to Mantel for outstanding services to the humanities and social sciences.

Mantel is working on the third instalment of her trilogy of novels based on the life of Cromwell. She won a Booker Prize for each of the first two, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. The British Academy described them as ‘providing the public with a deep insight into the periods they portray’. Meanwhile, MacCulloch is writing an historical biography of Cromwell, following on from his prize-winning life of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.  In conversation, they will consider how their work has demanded a reassessment of this deeply controversial historical figure, and the differences in the tasks of a novelist and a historian.

Mantel is author of 14 books and is currently writing The Mirror and the Light, the third book in the Wolf Hall trilogy. MacCulloch is best known for his 2009 BBC television series and book, The History of Christianity. He is professor of church history at the University of Oxford.