Jeanette Winterson – författare

'Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn't matter what'This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts. At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tender, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession.'Witty… extraordinary and exhilarating' The Times'She is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent abides' Vanity Fair'Many consider her to be the best living writer in this language... In her hands, words are fluid, radiant, humming' Evening Standard'A novel that deserves revisiting' Observer'A wonderful rites-of-passage novel' Mariella Frostrup

Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle.This is the story of Jeanette, born to be one of God's elect: adopted by a fanatical Pentecostal family and ablaze with her own zeal for the scriptures, she seems perfectly suited for the life of a missionary. But then she converts Melanie, and realises she loves this woman almost as much as she loves the Lord. How on Earth could her Church call that passion Unnatural?Both a groundbreaking coming-of-age novel and a pioneering work of autofiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit goes beyond facts into the deepest truths. Searing and tender, playful and provocative, it is a portrait of the artist as a young evangelist, re-writing her own Bible.Meet ten of literature's most iconic heroines, jacketed in bold portraits by female photographers from around the world.

The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival.This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness, about lessons in love, the search for a mother and a journey into madness and out again. It is generous, honest and true.‘Unforgettable… It’s the best book I have ever read about the cost of growing up’ Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

An invitation to change our lives and imagine the world anew through reading stories, in the new book from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Oranges Are Not the Only FruitI can change the story because I am the story.'Makes you think and makes you laugh' NigellaWith her execution looming, a woman is fighting for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of One Thousand and One Nights to show how its questions are still relevant to our lives today. Is love the most important thing in the world? What makes us happy?In her guise as Aladdin, Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know and look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realised through the power of books that she could read herself as fiction as well as fact.Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future – an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew.'Enchanting, unexpected and razor-sharp' Kamila Shamsie'One of the most gifted writers working today' New York TimesIn her hands, words are fluid, radiant, humming' Evening Standard

'This book is a deep, sensual plunge, a worship of the body, inside and out' The TimesIn a quiet English suburb, a love affair ignites. For our nameless narrator, Louise is the last in a long line of explosive passions, but the first to have broken their heart. With Louise's husband, Elgin, blocking love's course, their affair is doomed to unravel - until, that is, a terrible choice must be made.With its witty and masterful prose, Written on the Body takes the reader on a beguiling and defying exploration of love and its physical forms.'An ambitious work, at once a love story and a philosophical meditation on the body' Sunday Telegraph

***LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019*****SHORTLISTED FOR THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT PRIZE 2020****LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI PRIZE 2020**'Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful.'Inspired by Mary Shelley's gothic classic Frankenstein, discover this audacious new novel about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire.As Brexit grips Britain, Ry, a young transgender doctor, is falling in love. The object of their misguided affection: the celebrated AI-specialist, Professor Victor Stein. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his Mum again, is set to make his fortune with a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere.Ranging from 1816, when nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley pens her radical first novel, to a cryonics facility in present-day Arizona where the dead wait to return to life, Frankissstein shows us how much closer we are to the future than we realise.'Intelligent and inventive...very funny' The Times 'One of the most gifted writers working today' New York Times

Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is revolutionised by the iconic Jeanette Winterson in her page-turning, heart-breaking story of a baby girl banished from home.A baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged American city of New Bohemia. Her father has been driven mad by jealousy, her mother to exile by grief. Seventeen years later, Perdita doesn't know a lot about who she is or where she's come from – but she's about to find out.Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale vibrates with echoes of Shakespeare's original and tells a story of hearts broken and hearts healed, a story of revenge and forgiveness, a story that shows that whatever is lost shall be found.‘A shining delight of a novel’New York Times 'Clever and beautiful...it soars'Financial TimesSHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

'Joins the dots in a neglected narrative of female scientists, visionaries and code-breakers' ObserverHow is artificial intelligence changing the way we live and love? Now with a new chapter, this is the eye-opening new book from Sunday Times bestselling author Jeanette Winterson.Drawing on her years of thinking and reading about AI, Jeanette Winterson looks to history, religion, myth, literature, politics and, of course, computer science to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are happening now.With wit, compassion and curiosity, Winterson tackles AI's most interesting talking points - from the weirdness of backing up your brain and the connections between humans and non-human helpers to whether it's time to leave planet Earth.'Very funny... A kind of comparative mythology, where the hype and ideology of cutting-edge tech is read through the lens of far older stories' Spectator'Refreshingly optimistic' GuardianA 'Books of 2021' Pick in the Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard

Travelling across the Atlantic on board the QE2, Alice - a bright, young physicist - meets Jove, short for Giovanni, one of the world's most respected experts on time travel and a confirmed lothario. By the time the pair land in New York, Alice has become Jove's mistress, an affair of the heart which is only complicated further when Alice meets Jove's, wife, Stella; a tempestuous beauty born with a diamond at the base of her spine. As this love triangle turns into a menage-a-trois, Alice, Stella and Jove struggle against the currents immersing them, while their romance pulls into its wake the stories of other generations, philosophies, quantum physics and time travel. A celebration of the human heart in all its frailty, confusion and excess, Gut Symmetries is a lyrical evocation of parallel lives, loves and universes, from one of Britain's best loved authors.

Condemned to shoulder the world forever by the gods he dared defy, freedom seems unattainable to Atlas. But then he receives an unexpected visit from Heracles, the one man strong enough to share the burden . . .Jeanette Winterson's retelling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles asks difficult and eternal questions about the nature of choice and coercion. Visionary and inventive, Weight turns the familiar on its head to show us ourselves in a new light.The Myths series brings together some of the world's finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, David Grossman, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson.

From one of Britain’s best-loved literary novelists comes a magical, lyrical tale of the young orphan Silver, taken in by the ancient lighthousekeeper Mr. Pew, who reveals to her a world of myth and mystery through the art of storytelling.Motherless and anchorless, Silver is taken in by the timeless Mr. Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. Pew tells Silver ancient tales of longing and rootlessness, of the slippages that occur throughout every life. One life, Babel Dark’s, a nineteenth-century clergyman, opens like a map that Silver must follow, and the intertwining of myth and reality, of storytelling and experience, lead her through her own particular darkness.A story of mutability, talking birds and stolen books, of Darwin and Stevenson and of the Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, Lighthousekeeping is a way into the most secret recesses of our own hearts and minds. Jeanette Winterson is one of the most extraordinary and original writers of her generation, and this shows her at her lyrical best.

In this, her first collection of short stories, Winterson reveals all the facets of her extraordinary imagination. In prose that is full of imagery and word-play, she creates physical and psychological worlds that are at once familiar and yet shockingly strange.

These interlocking essays uncover art as an active force in the world - neither elitist or remote, present to those who want it, affecting even those who don't. Winterson's own passionate vision of art is presented here, provocatively and personally, in pieces on Modernism, autobiography, style, painting, the future of fiction, in two essays on Virginia Woolf, and more intimately in pieces where she describes her relationship to her work and the books that she loves.

'A book of innocence and bawdiness, fury and joy...needs to be read and re-read' The TimesOn the banks of the Thames a baby is found floating. Rescued by the Dog-Woman, a giant strong enough to fling an elephant into the air, their lives together will take them on a dizzying journey through space and time.As past and present collapse and centuries overlap, love, sex, truth, lies and twelve dancing princesses take centre stage.'Entrancing...fabulous... Its language retains the clear music of poetry' Sunday Telegraph'Simple prose shows the subtlest of minds behind it, swift, confident and dazzling' Financial Times'Her stories and characters levitate off the page into dancing life... A bold, bizarre and timely book' Independent

‘A shining delight of a novel’New York Times 'Clever and beautiful...it soars'Financial Times A baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged American city of New Bohemia. Her father has been driven mad by jealousy, her mother to exile by grief. Seventeen years later, Perdita doesn't know a lot about who she is or where she's come from - but she's about to find out. Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale vibrates with echoes of Shakespeare's original and tells a story of hearts broken and hearts healed, a story of revenge and forgiveness, a story that shows that whatever is lost shall be found.‘Emotionally wrought and profoundly intelligent... A supremely clever, compelling and emotionally affecting novel that deserves multiple readings to appreciate its many layers’Mail on Sunday 'There are passages here so concisely beautiful they give you goosebumps'Observer'Pulsates with such authenticity and imaginative generosity that I defy you not to engage with it'Independent

'Brave and ambitious' Independent In a near-future London, Sappho, Picasso and Handel each set upon the same plan - to flee the city by train. Finding themselves fellow passengers, the poet, the painter and the musician discover their fates drawn together by the curious agency of a book.As stories within stories unfold and journeys intersect, another world comes to the fore - one of painful beauty, where language has the power to heal.'Winterson's belief in love, beauty, and most of all, language, is evangelical and redemptive...it is timely and exciting to read' Rachel Cusk, The Times

'Winterson is a rangy pirate, a world-swashbuckler, a plunderer of stories, literatures and hearts' Ali Smith, Scotsman 'It's night. I'm sitting at my screen. There's an e-mail for me. I unwrap it. It says - Freedom, just for one night.'Ali, or Alix, is an e-writer. They will write anything you like, but on one condition: that you are prepared to enter your story. Finally, you can be the hero of your own life.But, there is a price to pay - the risk that you might leave the story as somebody else.'Brilliant, evocative writing... Winterson never seems to put a foot wrong... It is funny, clever, entertaining and wholly delightful' Spectator

'A fantasy, a vivid dream...inventive and brilliant' GuardianHenri has a passion for Napoleon - but Napoleon has a passion for chicken. As soldier and emperor butcher their way across Europe, glory falls to ruin and love turns to hate.But, when Henri encounters the red-haired, web-footed Villanelle, he discovers in her an equal. Together they abandon their pasts, and flee to the Venetian canals to meet their singular destiny in the city of chance and disguises.'A deeply imagined and beautiful book, often arrestingly so.' New York Times