Bookends with Mattea Roach For Jeanette Winterson, stories are essential to survival
Mar 15, 2026
Jeanette Winterson, acclaimed novelist and essayist who blends memoir, myth and fiction. She discusses why One Thousand and One Nights matters now. She centers Scheherazade as a figure of survival through storytelling. She explores how stories reshape identity, inspire social change and respond to modern challenges like climate and AI.
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Scheherazade Filibusters For Mercy
- Winterson admires Scheherazade as a young woman who saves herself and other women by nightly storytelling cliffhangers that transform the Sultan.
- Over three years she reframes the dominating narrative of violence into empathy, ending with the Sultan weeping and begging forgiveness.
Stories Shape Identity And Social Progress
- Winterson argues humans are hardwired for storytelling; narratives structure daily life and identity and wrong stories can wreck lives.
- Changing dominant stories (about race, gender, sexuality) has driven social progress by replacing harmful narratives with better ones.
Library Autodidact Shaped Her Self Concept
- Winterson credits self-education in a Carnegie library for escape from a poor, religious upbringing and for imagining different possible lives.
- She read English literature A to Z to discover worlds beyond her circumstances and learned to see herself as a changeable process.
