If next year’s Coffee Shop Author contest goes international, a London-based entrant could conceivably win with a novel written in Verde, a shop co-owned by novelist Jeanette Winterson. Writing in the Guardian, Winterson details how her modest townhouse, which had housed a food shop during the Napoleonic Wars, was targeted by a large coffee conglomerate that wanted to move into the gentrified and newly trendy Spitalsfield market area in 2005:

It looked great on paper: I would keep the upper floors for my own use, and the ground floor and basement would be for coffee. I like coffee, and I liked the historical neatness of returning a shop to the building, but as I researched the company, which I can’t name because I signed a confidentiality agreement, I realised that, for me, it was the wrong coffee and the wrong politics.

Instead of accepting the coffee company’s offer of a large payout, Winterson partnered with ex-New Yorker Harvey Cabaniss to open a shop selling ethically produced foodstuffs and what the novelist claims is “the best coffee in London, with the possible exception of the London Review of Books café.”

Winterson explains her decision as an attempt to inject a degree of individuality into an increasingly homogenous world:

We live in a cloned world where there is no real choice “ so when I see Verde on the corner, and Harvey sweeping the street or cleaning his windows before starting the day, and he’s been up since five because he wanted to roast a suckling pig, I know he’s doing all this not for big money but because it is his own life in his own way.

What is the point of being human if you cannot live your own life in your way? It is such a simple obvious ambition “ and so hard to achieve.