Annabel is a 2010 novel by Canada-based author Kathleen Winter. It was short-listed for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction[1] and adapted for BBC Radio by Emma Harding and Miranda Davies.
A baby is born in 1968, in far-from-everywhere northern Labrador, Canada. He is a hermaphrodite – a word unfamiliar to the midwife present at his birth, and to his stoic father and his fanciful mother – with both penis and vagina. His is a masculine world of men who trap for a living. After some days, then, his unsettled parents settle on Wayne as his name. He will be raised a boy, but his shadow self, Annabel, the name his mother whispers when they are alone, will live within him for two decades. Wayne heads into the bush with his father, but at home he dreams of synchronized swimming and begs for a sequined bathing suit. He is she, and they are a fluid, pastel contradiction in a rigid, black and white world. Puberty sets in and there is a medical emergency – Wayne’s abdomen floods with menstrual blood. And, once adult, Wayne will transform himself into who he wants to be. Winter’s dazzling debut addresses the riddle of gender and the tragedy of conformity with astonishing insight and eloquence.