Award-winning writer Jeanette Winterson will deliver a keynote lecture at the King's Festival of Artificial Intelligence, exploring why AI needs the arts.

Speaker

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester and raised in Lancashire by adoptive parents. She was raised in the Elim Pentecostal Church and, intending to become a Pentecostal Christian Missionary, she began evangelising and writing sermons at age six. By age 16 Winterson left home. Soon after, she read for a degree in English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.

After moving to London, her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published when she was 24 years old. It won the 1985 Whitbread Black for a First Novel, and was adapted for television by Winterson in 1990, which in turn won the BAFTA Award for Best Drama. She won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Passion.

Winterson’s subsequent novels explore the boundaries of physicality and the imagination, gender polarities, and sexual identities, and have won several literary awards. Her 2019 novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story, was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, and her most recent novel, Night Side of the River, was a Sunday Times Bestseller.

Her stage adaptation of The PowerBook in 2002 opened at the Royal National Theatre, London. She also bought a house in Spitalfields, East London, which she refurbished into a flat as a pied-a-terre and a ground-floor shop, Verde’s, to sell organic food.

Jeanette writes for many prominent publications including the Guardian, Times, Daily Mail, Observer, New York Times, and Harpers Bazaar, and has featured on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. She holds an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). She is also Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester and believes that art is for everyone, and it is her mission to prove it.

This event is in-person only. Please register on Eventbrite.  Registration will close at 4pm on Friday 17 May.

This event is part of the King's Festival of Artificial Intelligence, running from Tuesday 21 to Saturday 25 May 2024.

If you’re interested in this event, you may also want to join us for:

• Does it matter that intelligence has a history?
• Creative or Dangerous? Exploring the pros and cons of fake audio
• Cinema and Machine Vision
• Can, will and should machines be conscious?
• Digital Divination: creating Oracle Cards with Generative AI

Festival event times may be subject to change. Any changes will be communicated to registrants via Eventbrite emails.

Please note, King's events are free, which means we routinely overbook to allow for no-shows and avoid empty seats. Admission is on a first come, first served basis, so please arrive in good time to avoid disappointment. We will not be able to admit those without tickets or latecomers.