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Jeanette Winterson OBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn't work out. Discovering early the power of books she left home at 16 to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel at 25. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. She scripted the novel into a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. 27 years later she re-visited that material in the bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She has written 10 novels for adults, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. She writes regularly for the Guardian. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London. She believes that art is for everyone and it is her mission to prove it.
It's fair to say that you don't have to be a die-hard Jeanette Winterson fan to read her novels - but it probably helps. Only a fool would underrate her fierce intellectual ability, but it has to be said that her writing can at times be impenetrable and 'difficult'. It seems, however, that the stylistic devices that make Winterson's novels rather too clever for all tastes are perfectly suited to the short story genre - the intensity of her prose is in some way distilled by being compressed into a smaller space. This collection of stories, some written especially for this volume, some dating back as far as 12 years, is rich, dense and beautifully written. The preoccupations are familiar - sex, history, the passage of time - but the protagonists and their histories are fantastic creations: a god; a man who sleeps in a future world where sleeping is outlawed; a silent woman who buys her groceries in four-ounce packets; a passenger on an ocean liner surprised by love. I suspect you will want to return to them again and again. The Life of Thomas More (Kirkus UK)
