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Jeanette Winterson was one of the first British writers to tackle the implications of technology – and she’s still at the cutting edge. By So Mayer.

Jeanette Winterson remains at the cutting edge of writing

Author Jeanette Winterson.

Credit: Sam Churchill

Jeanette Winterson has lived her writing life at the cutting edge. Her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, won the Whitbread Book Award for best first novel in 1985, making her the first woman to do so. She was 26 years old, and published her second novel, the biblical retelling Boating for Beginners, the same year.

Two of her subsequent novels – The Passion, which follows Napoleon’s cook, and Sexing the Cherry, a feminist psychogeography of 17th century London among other far-flung times and places – defined what Canadian academic Linda Hutcheon termed “historiographic metafiction”, reflexive ways of retelling histories from below and inside out. With Art and Lies in 1994, Winterson moved into the near-future and the connective technology of the train carriage. From there onwards, her fiction for adults embraced the future in a blaze of physics, space travel, computing, gaming and biohacking, as her work increasingly draws parallels between artistic creativity and scientific innovation.

Witches, ghosts, folktales and feminist histories continue to appear entwined with these new frontiers, particularly in her short fiction, and she has written a number of fantastical novels for younger readers that are steeped in the importance of storytelling. With her recent book, the essay collection 12 Bytes: How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Way We Live and Love, Winterson is again at the cutting edge – and, as ever in her work, she offers a historical tour de force to show it, connecting the Industrial Revolution of her home town of Manchester – where she now teaches creative writing at the university – to Alan Turing’s Enigma machine and Gnostic thought, all in the service of arguing that more writers and artists are needed to do what she has done, most recently and dazzlingly in Frankissstein, and address AI and the more expansive artificial general intelligence (AGI) head-on: to tell better stories about the world that we’re in.

“It’s coming home with all the stories,” Winterson says of AGI, as the wind shakes the sunlight in the trees behind her kitchen windows. “All the things we’ve ever talked about, all the things we’ve told each other as legends or stories, about shapeshifting, about not being time-bound, about being able to get out of this body into another one.”

She tilts the screen and, in the Zoom window, she is momentarily haloed. I ask her how it feels to be an oracle, having been one of the first literary fiction writers in Britain to take and tackle technology seriously, at a time when science fiction was derided by the establishment. “First of all, thank you for noticing!” she says. “My nature is optimistic. Life is propositional: it’s not a force like gravity. We’re not doomed. I’m a realist – that comes from my working-class background, you’re going to shift for yourself or not at all. The world is what it is and it’s not going away. AGI is the most profound change we’ve faced, and our approach can’t be built on fear.”

She cites Marx and Engels’ observations of the immiseration of working Mancunians’ lives by the Industrial Revolution as knowledge that should enable us to think through this revolution better. In 12 Bytes, she links this possibility of an alternate integration of technology to a century of feminist thought and activism, observing the changes she has witnessed, written about and contributed to in her own lifetime.

“When I went to Oxford, there were four women writers on the syllabus,” she tells me. “Jane Austen, George Eliot. Only two of the Brontës, because one of them was thought not very good. This is in 1978. Virginia Woolf is not on the syllabus of an Oxbridge English degree. The moment of movement had started to happen when all of that was going to be questioned about women’s place in the world, women as writers, women as authorities.

“I was a young woman. And women had only been able to have their own bank accounts or get a mortgage in their own name for four years. When I say this, people look at me now and they think I must have been born back with the dinosaurs. And I say to young people, you don’t understand how recent this is where women have had financial and personal control over their bodies, over their money, over who they would marry, over what work they would do, and that they wouldn’t have to resign if they got pregnant or got married.”

It was within this ferment of change that Winterson wrote and published her first books with Pandora, one of a wave of women’s presses that swept through British publishing that includes Sheba, Virago and the Women’s Press, which she describes as “the midwives of women’s experience”. With editor Philippa Brewster, she made the decision to name the protagonist of Oranges – distinctly a novel – Jeanette, an early and defiant act of feminist autofiction in English.

“I’d read Henry Miller,” she says. “I know it’s all right for men to call themselves by their own name in fiction, because that’s metafiction. If women do it, it’s confessional. I said to Philippa, I do not want to be trapped in biography and biology.” The jeu d’esprit of her work ever since has been refusing that trap. Most famously, in the yearning Written on the Body, the second-person narrator is gender free, an astonishing magic in a book that focuses in on the desired and desiring body and its sensual awareness.

For her, this is what the unbounded space of the novel can do – but only by defying the norms that bound literary fiction when she started. “I need to remind the reader that we are in a theatre space when we’re reading. This is a construct where all sorts of things are possible because you’re messing with the realities of time. Just as in fairytales, they can be compressed, expanded.”

Fairytales run through her work, told and retold, one of the many traces of an influence that came, for Winterson, before literature. “My own early and most profound experiences of languages were, of course, the King James Bible and an oral tradition, in our house and indeed in my community, because these people were not educated, but they found it easy to remember,” she says.

“They spoke well, but it was an oral tradition. So, for me, as for all little children, words begin in the mouth before they land on the page.” That orature is dazzlingly on display in her answers, which arrive in full paragraphs, passionate and persuasive, especially as she warms to her current research. In the biographical note for 12 Bytes, she writes that she “was raised to be a missionary. This did and did not work out”, as readers of Oranges will know.

In 1990, Winterson adapted Oranges for the BBC, in a BAFTA-winning miniseries directed by Beeban (now Baroness) Kidron, a friend whose campaigning work with the 5Rights Foundation on young people’s right to digital privacy and protection she flags several times in 12 Bytes. At the heart of Winterson’s enthusiasm for the possibilities of AI, as at the heart of her novels, is not novelty but the same sense of care that Kidron expresses through her campaigning. In a world where loneliness has been described as an epidemic, Winterson sees AI assistants offering companionship and listening to the vulnerable, and the revolution that could come from that connection.

“All over the world right now, billions of people say that their most important and most profound relationship is not with a human being, it’s with a ... sky god,” she says.

“And in the Bible, it doesn’t say that God is thought. It says God is love. That is a huge statement, largely overlooked, because once we sit with it, what on earth does it mean when we are vaunting all our intellectual capacities and we’re left with these simple words God is love. What we’re saying is that the highest value in our terms is love. If we were to work with that, it would explode and upend everything, including all our religions. But nobody does because of the consequences.”

Whether approaching talking robot heads, transhumanist scientists or the two strangest moments in Shakespeare, both in The Winter’s Tale (the bear and the moving statue), Winterson explores the consequences of explosive love as something that is connected to intelligence and intellection. Her characters speak in wordplay and quotations and song lyrics; they design video games based on avant-garde French poets or encounter Mary Shelley, all on a quest to express and receive love.

Drawing on the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who argues for emotions as the source of cognition, Winterson suggests “the problem for humans is that the limbic system, which rules emotion and memory, always takes precedence over the neural highway when we’re stressed in some way, and that’s how we’ve survived. But psychoanalysis says that you can put a beat in, an intervention before your response, so that you’re not supercharged with emotion which is useless to you.

“We’ve got this horrible divide where people seem either really cold and rational and logical and they don’t understand the beatings of the human heart, or they’re just filled with permanent emotion and cannot step back. We’ve got that in America now and that’s why the facts mean nothing in MAGA America. All that matters is how people feel about something. That feels like the defeat, the decimation of all our intellectual progress, and I don’t want to see that. I don’t think it is a binary and it shouldn’t be a binary. It needs to be integrated. It needs to be a synthesis. How do we become a whole person?”

Even before her exploration of AI, Winterson’s novels made a feature of stepping back, weaving moments of high emotion, narrated in first-person or close third, with deviations: retellings of folktales that might be elaborated throughout a novel, or brief sensory descriptions addressed in second person to the reader. Her books show us a way to become a whole person through the kaleidoscope of their form rather than through psychologically realist single-character point of view.

“Literature is about the not-you, not the you,” she says passionately, in the kind of wordplay and inversions familiar to any of her readers. “You find the you in the not-you. That is what is liberating and completely misunderstood in all these kind of well-meaning diatribes about how people should read from their own experience. And it’s all focused on social realism. It’s so wrong. In the not-you, you find the you.

“I was Heathcliff, I was Huck Finn, and I was Hotspur when I was reading in the library. It wasn’t me I wanted to find, because I knew that me. I wanted to find the other me’s out there, the other possibilities. At that point, I didn’t know about Schrödinger, that you could be in a superposition in a box, and that the outcome wouldn’t be fixed till you opened the lid. But what I’ve understood with fiction is that it allows those many possible outcomes.”

The light flares at the screen, and we are moving. Winterson settles at another seat in her kitchen, under a skylight, and points behind herself to a vase of tulips, just before Zoom cuts out. It’s as metafictional a moment as I could have dreamt of: a blooming reference to The PowerBook’s key story within a story written by Ali/x, the gender fluid narrator who writes themselves as Ali into colonial history as a tulip-bearing (and -baring, as they’re carrying it in their pants) envoy from Suleiman the Magnificent to the Dutch, sparking what will become an all-consuming economic bubble.

Tulipomania crashed – but, as Winterson suggests, tulips vibrantly persist, not least because of the stories we tell of and with them. Her own high-risk highwire narrative acts have changed our language and continue to challenge our thinking and feeling. “We just need to read the big map on the wall,” she concludes, on how to avert tech-bro dystopia. “Not just be sitting down and looking at these isolated bits. This is where writers can come in. This is the moment when humans will either expand or die. I don’t know which it’s going to be. I would love to expand.”

Jeanette Winterson will be appearing at Sydney Writers’ Festival (May 19-27) and The Capitol, Melbourne, presented by The Wheeler Centre (May 24).

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 19, 2025 as "Winterson is coming".

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