Jeanette Winterson on ghosts, tech bros, and what her success taught her about class in Britain

Send us Fan MailIt's been 40 years since Jeanette Winterson's debut novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, launched a confident and daring new voice in English fiction, one that wasn’t afraid to take risks in the service of craft. Many books have followed,  including The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, and more recently Frankissstein: A Love Story. “I am an ambitious writer,” she has written. “I don’t see the point of being anything; no, not anything at all, if you don’t have ambition for it.”  Winterson's new collection, Night Side of the River, showcases her fascination with AI and technology within the classic form of the ghost story. As she says in this episode, "What's really fascinated me  with the rise of AI and Big Tech is that for the first time since the Enlightenment, science and religion are asking the same question: Is consciousness obliged to materiality, or could we go beyond the body?”. We also talk about one of Winterson’s literary touchstones, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.