Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson (born 1959) announced herself at 26 with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the semi-autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a Pentecostal household, and has since built one of contemporary British fiction’s most distinctive careers — a CBE, a professorship at Manchester, and a lifelong preoccupation with bodies, love, and what comes after both.

Alternative intelligence

That preoccupation led her, unusually for a literary novelist, straight toward the machines. Her novel Frankissstein (2019) reimagined Mary Shelley among transhumanists, and 12 Bytes (2021) collected twelve essays arguing that humanity’s future is a merged future with the AI we are creating. Reviewers called the book refreshingly optimistic; harsher critics found its embrace of AGI naive, even messianic.

In March 2025, when OpenAI unveiled a creative-writing model with a metafictional short story about grief, most of the literary world scoffed. Winterson, in The Guardian, praised it — arguing the term “artificial” should give way to “alternative” intelligence, because AI’s capacity to be other is exactly what a species mired in its own habits needs. Having let AI read us, she wrote, we should learn to read it.

The endorsement drew fire from writers who saw a Booker-generation novelist blessing the very technology trained on unlicensed books — a debate colleagues like Kazuo Ishiguro and the Society of Authors have waged from the other side. Winterson is careful to say artists should be paid; she simply refuses to treat the machine itself as the enemy.