Award-winning author Hilary Mantel lying low after astonishing attack on Duchess of Cambridge

Writer Hilary Mantel was today lying low at her seaside apartment in the wake of her astonishing outburst on the Duchess of Cambridge.

Award-winning novelist Mantel, was approached at her home near Exeter to explain why she called the Duchess, 31, a "shop window mannequin" with a "perfect plastic smile" and "no personality of her own".

However, a man who answered the intercom at her beautiful seaside home in Budleigh Salterton, Devon, said the writer would not be commenting on her remarks.

Mantel, 60, is the first woman to receive the Man Booker Prize twice.

The acclaimed author scooped the award in 2009 for Wolf Hall, the first part of a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell.

The second part of the series, Bring Up The Bodies, won the Costa Book of the Year award last year, as well as a second Booker Prize for the writer.

Mantel studied law at LSE and Sheffield University, where she discovered socialism, and she has gone on to write more than a dozen books.

Her previous jobs include working in a geriatric ward, and also in a department store as a sales assistant.

Earlier this month she revealed her own body image issues, describing with admirable honesty how she's coped with weight gain after being diagnosed with endometriosis, a gynaecological condition at 27.

In an extract from her memoir in The Guardian, she said it took many years for her to realise how her body had changed so drastically.

She wrote: 'For a few years, in my dreams, I stayed thin, and wore a thin person's clothes.

'Even today, I sometimes see myself, in one of the cities I go to when I am asleep, coming out of a bookshop or sitting at a cafe table, trim and narrow.'