Considered a risky venture, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was first published in paperback and even then in a limited run by Pandora Press in 1985. The germ of an idea from an unsuccessful job interview, the novel found a popular market in small-scale booksellers until the award of the Whitbread Prize for the best debut novel (1985) precipitated an order from the major national chain, W. H. Smith (Winterson, 1985: xiii). The novel’s irreverent style of “Northern” humour, and fantasy and lyricism blended with structural experimentation, elicited the famous comment from Gore Vidal that Winterson was “the most interesting young writer I have read in twenty years” (Winterson, 1985). The seeds of her subsequent …
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Citation: Cox, Katharine. "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 April 2007 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3015, accessed 23 November 2024.]
