The novelist and journalist Jeanette Winterson was adopted by a strict religious family who frowned on her reading anything but the six books in the house which included the Bible and the complete concordance to the Old and New Testaments. Somehow she still managed to read, with the help of a torch in the outside toilet. After grammar school she won a place at Oxford and wrote her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit when she was 23. Her latest book Lighthousekeeping was published this year. Winterson writes regularly for The Times and offers nuggets of folksy wisdom to readers of her website. She lives in Oxfordshire in a thatched cottage and also in a 1780s house in Spitalfields. Her advice to anyone facing a mid-life crisis is to buy a second home, a chance for a new beginning. Last year she spent her birthday watching the Rolling Stones and says it is going to be hard to improve on that this year. She advises fellow Virgoans to “give yourself a present. Vow to make the thing you really want to happen, happen.” Jeanette Winterson is 45 today.
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