QUICK TAKES - Oct. 7, 2009

The prestigious Man Booker Prize was awarded Tuesday to Hilary Mantel for “Wolf Hall,” her historical fiction of Henry VIII’s court. It is scheduled to be released in the United States next week.

Mantel was considered the odds-on favorite going into Tuesday’s ceremony in London and beat out shortlisted authors A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee, Adam Foulds, Simon Mawer and Sarah Waters. She will receive $83,500.

In Mantel’s telling, historical tropes get a freshening-up. Cromwell is more bureaucrat than revolutionary, Sir Thomas More is not the heroic man of faith as we’ve come to know and Henry VIII is not the virile sex fiend of Showtime’s “The Tudors.”

-- Carolyn Kellogg