Feisty Jeanette Winterson wrote her landmark first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in two months because she needed money. It won the Whitbread Prize for best first book in 1985 and has become a modern queer classic. (The television version, adapted by Winterson, won the BAFTA for best drama in 1990.) Her finest novel is The Passion, which takes place in France and Venice during the Napoleonic Wars, and her most ambitious novel is Sexing the Cherry, which touches down in several centuries but is most firmly rooted in the Restoration. All of her fiction combines elements of history, religion, myth, and magic realism to form a sort of quicksilver anti-reality, and her real life is equally exciting. From 1988 to 2000, she was partners with Margaret Reynolds, notwithstanding Winterson's affair with Pat Kavanagh, who is still married to London literary star, Julian Barnes, and happens to be Winterson's agent. Many believe that relationship to be the inspiration for her novel about an affair, Written on the Body, published in 1992 and dedicated "to Peggy Reynolds with love." When asked by an influential British newspaper to name the best book of the year, she chose her own. More recently she has published Gut Symmetries, The Powerbook, which she adapted as a play for the Royal National Theatre, and Lighthousekeeping. Her website, with frequent updates and a monthly letter, is among the best of any writer's. In 2006, she received an OBE. Her new novel, The Stone Gods, will be published in Britain on September 27.
Tom Ford brought sexy back in 1994 when little Justin Timberlake was still a castmember of the Mickey Mouse Club. On the plus side: Ford took charge of the ailing Gucci company, which was nearly bankrupt and dead as a brand, and within a year made it a fashion sensation. By 1999, it was valued at $4.3 billion. He had a similar success turning around Yves Saint-Laurent. Thanks to his brilliant hiring of Carine Roitfeld, he knew what was hot before anyone else on the planet. And he's had the extreme good taste to stay with his partner, Richard Buckley, fourteen years his senior, for nearly twenty years. On the minus side: What has he done since leaving the Gucci group in 2004? Last year when he guest edited Vanity Fair he put himself on the cover with two naked young women. (Tacky.) And when W let him do whatever he wanted with the Karshner triplets, he opted for cold and stale. (Unforgivable.) Now he has launched his own fashion brand, starting with his tremendously popular luxury sunglasses, and a menswear line available exclusively at his enormous Madison Avenue store, every inch of which looks like it's trying too hard. Not to worry, he'll find his way back.