Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a writer. She grew up in Lancashire, the adopted daughter of

evangelical parents who looked on her as a child they could dedicate to God. At 15 she fell in love with another woman, left home for good,

and after working in a variety of manual jobs, including a spell in a funeral parlour,

got herself into Oxford. Her first book,

Oranges are not the only fruit, based on her childhood,

was published when she was 25 and won the Whitbread Award.

More books and more prizes followed,

each one attracting criticism and claim in equal measure.

Her latest art and lies has been attacked with particular savagery in some quarters.

She remains impervious. As long as I am still being

pummeled, she says, I know I'm on the right track. She is Jeanette

Winterson. You've been pummeled quite hard, Jeanette, over the past couple of years by the critics.

Are you saying that you need that, that it motivates you in some way?

It doesn't motivate me. It makes me sure of what I am about. After I published Sexing the Cherry in 1989 I

decided that I would never again read any reviews and I have stuck to that. You can't peep round the corner. If you make that decision you must read nothing.

And so sometimes friends tell me that there has been something particularly insightful which can help me and I read that but the rest it's either praise or

its blame and they're both the same to a writer. But you obviously do read things that

are written about you I mean you after a particularly devastating profile was written about you

you went round to the writer's house and well gave a what for really didn't you?

Yes I was very angry about that I didn't read it, but so many of my friends

...