Less well recognised is the fact she is also an accomplished short-story writer and her new collection, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, is a beautiful, pocket-sized paperback whose contents showcase the writer at her best.
They are a dark set of tales whose narrators range from a high-powered businessman whose casual infidelity leads to the unexpectedly dramatic dissolution of his marriage, to a young girl watching her sister slowly starve herself to death.
But many are also shot through with a dark humour that recognises the inherent absurdity of the human condition, and Mantel's writing is so pared down and precise that there is not a word out of place.
Many of the stories read like a full-length novel distilled down to its most pure and concentrated essence, and she has the ability to create vivid, tangible characters and situations that draw you into the story despite yourself.
Take the following description from of an unsavoury boarding house as experienced by a second-rate novelist-cum-biographer in How Shall I Know You?: ''I stood and breathed in - because one must breathe - the tar of ten thousand cigarettes, fats of ten thousand breakfasts, the leaking metal seep of a thousand shaving cuts, and the horse-chestnut whiff of nocturnal emissions. Each odour, ineradicable for a decade, had burrowed into the limp chintz of the curtains and the scarlet carpet that ran up the narrow stairs.''
Just reading it makes you want to cringe, as much from the narrator's tortured prose as from the desire to escape the cloying stench her description evokes.
Written over the past 14 years, some tales are certainly better than others and all have already appeared elsewhere (the titular story was run last month in The Guardian and caused considerable controversy when Mantel revealed it to be a piece of historical wish-fulfilment) but this is the first time they have been brought together in a single publication.
It is interesting to track the development of her writing over time, and despite the stories' varying provenance there are a number of common themes and images - most notably that of an emotionally or physically failing heart - that reappear again and again, adding a satisfying sense of cohesion to what is an already outstanding collection of individual works.
It will certainly find a place in my bookcase alongside the best of her award-winning novels.
• Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.
