Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. She is a beloved cultural icon and queer trailblazer who published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, at twenty-five. Over two decades later she revisited that material in her internationally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Winterson has written thirteen novels for adults and three collections of short stories, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. Her novel Written on the Body was named one of the 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature by the New York Times. Since her innovative and forward-thinking writing about AI in her essay collection 12 Bytes, she speaks at tech conferences around the world. She is professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester and writes a popular Substack, Mind Over Matter. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London.