Photograph by Chris Boland
Jeanette Winterson reads from her new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, and her story ‘All I Know About Gertrude Stein’ from Granta 115: The F Word.
Photograph by Chris Boland
‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
Jeanette Winterson is the author of more than twenty books, which include novels, non-fiction and works for children. Her first book, the autobiographical novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, won the 1985 Whitbread Award and her adaptation of the novel for television won a BAFTA. Winterson was first published in Granta in 1988 and was later chosen as one of the magazine’s Best of Young British Novelists in 1993.She teaches creative writing at the University of Manchester, and is currently working on a film about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
More about the author →Saskia Vogel is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, now living in Berlin. Her debut novel Permission was published in five languages. The Swedish edition was translated by Johanne Lykke Holm. Vogel has translated over twenty fiction, poetry, and non-fiction titles from Swedish into English, including works by Linnea Axelsson, Johanne Lykke Holm, Balsam Karam, Karolina Ramqvist, Steve Sem-Sandberg, Lina Wolff and Jessica Schiefauer, whose Girls Lost was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Her translation of Johannes Anyuru’s They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears won the Firecracker Award for fiction. Vogel’s writing has been awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature and longlisted for the Believer Book Award and the Pushcart Prize. She was Princeton University’s Fall 2022 Translator in Residence. You can read her work in the New Yorker, LitHub, the New York Times, the White Review, the Offing, Elsewhere and elsewhere. Photograph © Fette Sans
More about the author →‘My lover Picasso is going through her Blue Period. In the past her periods have always been red.’
‘You were a coat of many colours wrestled into the dirt.’
‘We all knew that about the gods – that they were total sex.’
‘From when we first began living together in settlements, bacteria and viruses were with us, replicating, mutating and jumping species with extraordinary agility.’
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