Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian.

She is editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage. She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and also wrote 'Great Moments in Aviation,' a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Writers' in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Mostly, author's attempting to read their own work crash and burn - not so here.Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. Surprisingly, I also enjoyed Winterson's reading. Perhaps Winterson's craft is to get the reader thinking about other people's struggles while smiling.

The narrative itself conveys theme and symbolism enough without the quasi-religious element (although I do get the intended irony and allusion). Perhaps her use of parables which pepper her narrative was intended to give the novel gravitas, but I actually found those interludes unsubtle and tedious. I personally don't find Winterson's style or content that weighty. I assume because Winterson's themes include religion and sexuality and their elements of controversy she is thought of as literary - Wood merely light entertainment. Both from Lancashire, parallels will be drawn between Wood and Winterson, not just because of place but also because of a shared motif. You can't help it when you listen to this book to think of the late Victoria Wood and her gentle satire of the bourgeoise attitudes of the aspiring working classes.

Oranges are not the only fruit book