07 Nov

20:00

Koninklijke Schouwburg

Korte Voorhout 3, 2511 CW Den Haag, The Hague

Acclaimed author Jeanette Winterson discusses her impressive body of work, including her latest book, 'One Aladdin, Two Lamps', as part of the Crossing Border festival.

Jeanette Winterson in conversation with Toef Jaeger

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Jeanette Winterson (1959) grew up in Manchester. During her English studies at the University of Oxford, she wrote her acclaimed debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which was awarded the Whitbread Award. Since then, she has built an impressive body of work including novels, short story collections, children's books, and memoirs. For her contribution to literature, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2018.

About One Aladdin, Two Lamps

Facing execution, a woman fights for her life. Every night, she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin, Two Lamps breaks open the legendary tale of One Thousand and One Nights and shows how its questions are still relevant to our lives today. Is love the most important thing in the world? What makes us happy?

In her role as Aladdin, Jeanette Winterson invites us to reread what we think we know, and to re-examine how fiction works in our lives. She gives us the courage to change our own stories and rewrite endings. As a young working-class woman with little future prospect beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realized through the power of books that she could read herself as both fiction and fact.

By intertwining fiction, magic, and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and at the same time a radical gesture towards the future — an invitation to revisit our own stories and reimagine the world.