Editions

Written on the Body

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099598275

  • Length: 192  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 13mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 138g

  • RRP: £8.99

Written on the Body

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there.

In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille.

I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, tell the whole story.

I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099598275

  • Length: 192  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 13mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 138g

  • RRP: £8.99

Reviews

  • Part love story, part philosophical treatise, part anatomical guide, Written on the Body defies categorisation, dispensing with clichés and stereotypes to forge, from the raw physicality of the body itself, a new language for love.

    Jamei Qautro, Guardian

  • Winterson's novels are about exploding our complacent notions of the real, breaking down received ideas of gender, time and space... John Donne wrote, "Love...makes one little room, as everywhere." Winterson's novel arrives at a similar affirmation

    Time Out

  • An ambitious work, at once a love story and a philosophical meditation on the body...the result is a work that is consistently revelatory about the phenomenon of love

    New York Times Book Review

  • This book is a deep sensual plunge, a worship of the body, inside and out

    Guardian

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About the Author

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn’t work out. Discovering early the power of books she left home at 16 to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel at 25. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. She scripted the novel into a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. 27 years later she re-visited that material in the bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She has written 10 novels for adults, as well as children’s books, non-fiction and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London. She believes that art is for everyone and it is her mission to prove it.

Jeanette Winterson

Related articles

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Features

Read women in 2019: VINTAGE classic and new female authors

Join us at VINTAGE in a year of challenging ourselves to listen, hear and respond to some of the greatest female writers history has to offer. From Margaret Atwood to Mary Wollstonecraft, revisit your favourites, discover new voices and fill your bookshelf and your year with women’s voices. They matter.
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Extracts

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson OBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn’t work out. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. Read an extract of the novel below
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Podcasts

Hogarth Shakespeare with Jeanette Winterson and Howard Jacobson

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