Portrait: British novelist Jeanette Winterson

By Chantal on Tuesday, December 22, 2009 - 14:03

I like books. No, wait, scratch that. I love books. I like to drown myself in a different world and escape from the real world for a while.

I know psychologists would have a field day with people like that and ask them why they have the need to escape from the world (I know mine did), but for me it basically comes down to having a visualization level that exists at the top.

Give me one well written sentence that describes a scene and I am there, literally there in the story, watching from a distance how everything unfolds and actually feeling the emotion. Can you just imagine what an entire book does for me?

I prefer crime novels, particularly ones with the most horror and shocking things in them, because I like to challenge myself to see how much I can take, but I can also enjoy a good sci-fi, romance, heck even a children’s book can be just as fun because I will see everything from a child’s perspective and let me tell you, that’s more fun than being on a rollercoaster, plus it is a little less nauseating and physically demanding.

The one thing I like even better than my horror is lesbian fiction, lesbian writers, anything that involves lesbians and reading material, and I won’t shy away from pictures either *wink*.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit was one of the first, if not the first lesbian novel by a lesbian writer that I read. It simply blew me away from the first sentence and not a lot of writers can do that. Jeanette Winterson is one of those writers who can, and I wasn’t the only one blown away by it.

It was Winterson’s first novel to be published in 1985 and earned praise from all around; it won the Best First Novel award from the Whitbread Book Awards (renamed the Costa Book Awards) in 1985 and, once adapted for television by Winterson herself, it won the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Awards) for Best Drama.

Winterson was born in Manchester and raised in Accrington, Lancashire by her adoptive parents Constance and John William Winterson, both Pentecostal Christian Missionaries. Winterson began evangelizing and writing sermons at age six, but ten years later, Winterson came out as a lesbian after falling in love with a girl and left home.

While she took her A levels, Winterson lived in various places and supported herself by evening and weekend work. She even took a year off to earn money and worked in a psychiatric institution.

After reading English at Oxford University, Winterson did the odd jobs in theatre and wrote her first novel Oranges [Are Not The Only Fruit] when she was 23, and a year later in 1985 she was a published writer when Oranges hit the shelves.

While working for Pandora Press, she also published Boating For Beginners, a comic book with pictures. Later on she published other works with Bloomsbury in the UK and Knopf in the States, and became a full-time writer.

Before Bloomsbury published Tanglewreck, her first novel for older children of the age 9-11, Winterson worked on various other projects, including the dramatization of Oranges in 1990 and the adaptation of her novel The.PowerBook. This was done for the Royal National Theatre in London in 2002 and it starred Fiona Shaw, Saffron Burrows and Pauline Lynch.