February 2012

Jeanette Winterson

Resident in A Room for London from 21 - 25 February 2012.

Was there ever such a place? The Bible story is simple. God destroyed the wicked world and only Noah and his family were saved. After forty days and forty nights, the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat and as the floodwaters began to subside, the ark stayed there.

Imagine it. Evidence of an impossible moment, marooned like a memory point above time. The thing couldn’t have happened. But it did. Part miracle part madness.

Photograph by Peter Pietsch

Click to download as mp3

Subscribe on iTunes

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester and raised in Lancashire by adoptive parents. She was raised in the Elim Pentecostal Church and, intending to become a Pentecostal Christian Missionary, she began evangelising and writing sermons at age six. By age 16 Winterson left home. She soon after read for a degree in English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.

After moving to London, her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published when she was 24 years old. It won the 1985 Whitbread Black for a First Novel, and was adapted for television by Winterson in 1990, which in turn won the BAFTA Award for Best Drama. She won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Passion.

Winterson’s subsequent novels explore the boundaries of physicality and the imagination, gender polarities, and sexual identities, and have won several literary awards. Her stage adaptation of The PowerBook in 2002 opened at the Royal National Theatre, London. She also bought a house in Spitalfields in East London, which she refurbished into a flat as a pied-a-terre and a ground-floor shop, Verde’s, to sell organic food.

Winterson was made an officer of Order of the British Empire (OBE) at the 2006 New Year Honours.

A London Address podcasts are in collaboration with the Guardian.