Books Previews: Fiction at the Festival

Jeanette Winterson

Adopted by Pentecostal working-class parents, Winterson claims that she was “not encouraged to be clever.” Contrary to all expectations, she left home at 16 after falling in love with another girl, scraped a living while completing her A-Levels, and eventually read English at Oxford.

Since then, Winterson has had a prolific writing career, garnered numerous awards, and been awarded an OBE for her services to literature. Her first novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit— written when she was only 23—has been widely and consistently acclaimed, dramatised for the BBC and now features on many university syllabuses. Her appearance at the book festival marks 25 years since the publication of Oranges...

Will Self

Once sacked from The Observer for allegedly snorting heroin in the toilet of the Prime Minister’s election jet, cult idol Will Self is anything but a bore. An author, journalist and frequent television talking-head whose work centres on postmodern satire and urban alienation, Self has successfully balanced popular acclaim and counter-cultural intellectualism for well over a decade.

He will be reading from and discussing his new book, Walking to Hollywood an in event is titled “the dreams and fantasies of an obsessive-compulsive flâneur”. Make of that what you will.

Joyce Carol Oates

Since publishing her first book in 1963, Joyce Carol Oates has gone on to publish over fifty novels, as well as several collections of short stories, poetry and non-fiction. You could be forgiven for thinking writing was her full-time profession, but Oates is a teacher as much as a writer, and has been lecturing in creative writing at Princeton University since 1978.

Oates’ work displays a nostalgia for her rural working class childhood, constructs a uniquely Gothic-tinged brand of social critique, and deals with just about every human emotion ever experienced.

The woman behind some of the most graphic, visceral and violent novels, is also someone who claims to have “always lived a very conventional life of moderation”; hard to believe.