Literary Lesbians

Fifteen exceptional wordsmiths we love.

Jeanette Winterson

Adored out lesbian author Jeanette Winterson has won several awards around the world for her fiction and adaptations, including the UK’s Whitbread Prize, UK, and the Cannes Film Festival Prix d’Argent. For over 20 years she’s been LGBT literary royalty, but in 2006 it became official when she was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for her services to literature.

In addition to her 14 books, she has adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for TV, The PowerBook for stage, and The Passion for screen. Winterson currently splits her time between Gloucestershire, London and Paris. The prolific writer seems always to have a novel in the works, and in the meantime writes regularly for various UK newspapers, especially The Times and The Guardian, on subjects including Harry Potter, British Parliament and Hercules.

Winterson is passionate not only about writing, but about art, ballet and opera. Her latest book, Tanglewreck, is a collaboration with her goddaughter Eleanor, 10, and Eleanor’s seven-year-old sister Cara. Released in July 2007, it’s an action-packed, imaginative tale involving time and space travel and an attempt at world domination by a clever, evil and beautiful woman called Regalia Mason.

A staunch believer in pushing the boundaries of thought process, Winterson told The Guardian UK, “I don’t understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it’s a mind-altering possibility,” she says. “I don’t even want to please the reader, I want to change them, to expand their imaginations, seduce them, free them, take them to a place they haven’t been before.” –DP


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