Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson OBE has written 10 novels, children's books, non-fiction and screenplays, and writes regularly for the Guardian. She was adopted by Pentecostal parents and raised in Manchester to be a missionary, which she wrote about in her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and twenty-seven years later in her bestselling memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? The Winter's Tale tells the story of Perdita, the abandoned child. 'All of us have talismanic texts that we have carried around and that carry us around. I have worked with The Winter's Tale in many disguises for many years,' Jeanette says of the play. The result is The Gap of Time, her cover version.