Hilary Mantel‘s book “Wolf Hall” is about Henry VIII’s brilliant chief minister Thomas Cromwell, but the author is every bit as smart as her subject. Mantel has leveraged writing a literary work of historical fiction into a TV miniseries on PBS and a new Broadway show. As an author–my book “Kingston by Starlight” is a work of historical fiction– I had to find out how she did it. So I sat down with her at the WSJ Cafe, the Wall Street Journal’s video interview series, to get her take on “Wolf Hall”–the book, the TV show and the stage production. I wrote a brief about Mantel for WSJ.com; here’s the video.

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