The British author Hilary Mantel has won this year's Man Booker literary prize for her historical novel, Bring Up The Bodies. She is the first woman and the first Briton to win the prize for fiction twice.

The chairman of the judges described Ms Mantel as the greatest modern English prose writer.

Bring Up The Bodies is the second book in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, an adviser to King Henry VIII, and charts Anne Boleyn's spectacular fall from grace and execution the following year.