Jeanette Winterson
About Author
Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England, and adopted by Pentecostal parents who brought her up in the nearby mill-town of Accrington.
As a Northern working class girl she was not encouraged to be clever. Her adopted father was a factory worker, her mother stayed at home. There were only six books in the house, including the Bible and Cruden's Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testaments. Strangely, one of the other books was Malory's Morte d'Arthur, and it was this that started her life quest of reading and writing.
The house had no bathroom either, which was fortunate because it meant that Jeanette could read her books by flashlight in the outside toilet.
Reading was not much approved unless it was the Bible. Her parents intended her for the missionary field. Schooling was erratic but Jeanette had got herself into a girl's grammar school and later she read English at Oxford University.
While she took her A levels she lived in various places, supporting herself by evening and weekend work. In a year off to earn money, she worked as a domestic in a lunatic asylum.
After Oxford, she did odd jobs in the theatre and wrote her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, when she was 23. It was published a year later in 1985.
At the same time she published a comic book with pictures, Boating For Beginners. She then worked for her publishers at the time, Pandora Press, before publishing The Passion in 1987 with Bloomsbury in the UK.
At that point she became a full-time writer, publishing Sexing The Cherry in 1989, Written On The Body in 1992, Art & Lies 1994, Art Objects (essays) 1995, Gut Symmetries 1997, The World And Other Places (short stories) 1998, The Powerbook in 2000, a book for children: The King of Capri in 2003, and Lighthousekeeping in 2004.
Her first children's novel, Tanglewreck, was published in 2006. In addition she dramatised Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit for BBCTV in 1990, and wrote a TV film, Great Moments In Aviation for BBC 2 in 1994.
Jeanette Winterson has won various awards around the world for her fiction and adaptations, including the Whitbread Prize, UK, and the Prix d'argent, Cannes Film Festival.
She writes regularly for various UK newspapers, especially The Times and The Guardian.
Apart from her love of books, she loves cars, and at present drives a Landrover Defender 90 TD1, all black with lots of chrome and alloy, and a Porsche 911 Targa.
Jeanette Winterson lives in the country in Oxfordshire, in a seventeenth century thatched cottage on the river, and in a 1780's house in Spitalfields, London.
Author link
www.bloomsbury.com/tanglewreck; www.jeanettewinterson.com
Interview
November 2009
BATTLE OF THE SUN
Jeanette Winterson talks to ReadingZone about her latest children's book, Battle of the Sun (Bloomsbury).
The Battle of the Sun is a story about greed, magic and intrigue, set in Elizabethan London. London is being turned into gold and its people are starving. Only two children can save them.
Q: You are already well-known adult writer, why did you start to write for children?
A: I started to write children's stories for my god children, who are now 13 and ten. I wrote the King of Capri for them when they were younger and as they got older, they started to ask a lot of questions about time - what is time, why don't adults have enough time, why time flies - and it made time sound like a commodity rather than an experience or a dimension.
So I wanted to talk about time and to imagine a world where time becomes a commodity, which makes it easier to talk about. That became my first novel for children, which is called Tanglewreck.
Q: Why did you set your new book, The Battle of the Sun, in the past?
A: I want children to feel at home with big stretches in time. We may live in the modern world but I want children to feel at home in many places, the seventeenth century or post modern fiction, when they are older.
Q: The story is set in Spitalfields in London, is that an area you know well?
A: I often stay in Spitalfields when I am writing. I felt it was the right setting for the story because it embodies layers of time. When the Romans landed in Britain, they came up the river to Spitalfields.
When the Romans left, the roads became more winding because oxen carts bend, and in the book I write about bends in time.
If you visit Spitalfields today, you can still see the winding roads of Elizabethan times set against the symmetry of Georgian and Victorian buildings, alongside the fantastic glass and steel walls of modern banks. Your imagination is let loose here.
Q: The book has a very realistic backdrop, but it's also about dragons and magic. Do you like the idea of magic existing in the ordinary world?
A: Some people call those elements fantasy, I think of them as a 'different kind of real', as a child once described it to me. There is more than one kind of reality and not everything happens in the visible world. We have to have magic in our lives and I am sure that that is why so many grown ups enjoyed Harry Potter.
Q: In the story, an alchemist wants to turn London into gold - that sounds wonderful.
A: I wanted to write about this because our modern world has become a money-making machine. In the story, when everything starts turning gold, there is delight but what are the consequences, morally and emotionally, of making everything gold? What would it really be like if everything turned into gold?
Q: Did you know how the book would end?
A: I didn't have a sense of what this story would be when I started, so no, I didn't know how it would end. All I knew is that it would be set in Elizabethan London. It's an exciting period for me and this part of London was important then.
I don't worry about what a book is going to do when I start to write something. You let in a certain number of characters and then see what the ending will be. Its interesting to see where it is going and if it excites me, then I hope it will excite the readers.
Q: Do you have any tips for children who want to write?
A: Think of the most exciting thing you can think of, what idea is in your head, a character or a happening or a place? and start from there.
If there's a castle in your head, whose castle is it, is it threatening or inviting? Or maybe you have a character in your head, so is it a girl or a boy, are they rich or poor? Reach for the paper and the story starts to write itself.
If you think about Jack and the Beanstalk, a boy is sent to the market by his mother to sell his cow. It's the most awful, boring start to a story you can think of but it becomes very magical.
Often in fairy stories the story is set up in the first paragraph, so you can rewrite them and play with them.
Very simple, familiar things offer innumerable possibilities. I have written a television drama for the BBC based on children finding a genie in a bottle. Where in the modern world would that happen? In a recycling yard. The ingredients for a story are always around you.
