Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson (born 27 August 1959) is an English author.

Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was a semi-autobiographical novel about a lesbian growing up in an English Pentecostal community. Other novels explore gender polarities and sexual identity and later ones the relations between humans and technology. She broadcasts and teaches creative writing. She has won a Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, a BAFTA Award for Best Drama, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the St. Louis Literary Award, and the Lambda Literary Award twice. She has received an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to literature, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her novels have been translated to almost 20 languages.

Early life and education
Winterson was born in Manchester and adopted by Constance and John William Winterson on 21 January 1960. She grew up in Accrington, Lancashire, and was raised in the Elim Pentecostal Church. She was raised to become a Pentecostal Christian missionary, and she began evangelising and writing sermons at the age of six.

By the age of 16, Winterson had come out as a lesbian and left home. She soon after attended Accrington and Rossendale College, and supported herself at a variety of odd jobs while studying English at St. Catherine's College, Oxford (1978–1981).

Career
After she moved to London, she took assorted theatre work, including at the Roundhouse, and wrote her debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical story about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against convention. One job Winterson applied for was as an editorial assistant at Pandora Press, a feminist imprint newly founded in 1983 by Philippa Brewster, and in 1985 Brewster published Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which won the Whitbread Prize for a First Novel. Winterson adapted it for television in 1990. Her novel The Passion was set in Napoleonic Europe.

Winterson's subsequent novels explore the boundaries of physicality and the imagination, gender polarities, and sexual identities, and have won several literary awards. Her stage adaptation of The PowerBook in 2002 opened at the Royal National Theatre, London. She also bought a derelict terraced house in Spitalfields, East London, which she refurbished into an occasional flat and a ground-floor shop, Verde's, to sell organic food. In January 2017, she discussed closing the shop when a spike in rateable value, and so business rates, threatened to make the business untenable.

In 2009, Winterson donated the short story "Dog Days" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, covering four collections of UK stories by 38 authors. Her story appeared in the Fire collection. She also supported the relaunch of the Bush Theatre in London's Shepherd's Bush. She wrote and performed work for the Sixty Six Books project, based on a chapter of the King James Bible, along with other novelists and poets including Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy, Anne Michaels and Catherine Tate.

Winterson's 2012 novella The Daylight Gate, based on the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials, appeared on their 400th anniversary. Its main character, Alice Nutter, is based on the real-life woman of the same name. The Guardian's Sarah Hall describes the work: "'the narrative voice is irrefutable; this is old-fashioned storytelling, with a sermonic tone that commands and terrifies. It's also like courtroom reportage, sworn witness testimony. The sentences are short, truthful – and dreadful.... Absolutism is Winterson's forte, and it's the perfect mode to verify supernatural events when they occur. You're not asked to believe in magic. Magic exists. A severed head talks. A man is transmogrified into a hare. The story is stretched as tight as a rack, so the reader's disbelief is ruptured rather than suspended. And if doubt remains, the text's sensuality persuades.'"

In 2012, Winterson succeeded Colm Tóibín as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.

Her 2019 novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story, was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

In October 2023, Jonathan Cape published Night Side of the River. Suzi Feay, writing for Literary Review, said: "In these enjoyable tales Winterson has ably served the genre, while also sketching some unsettling future directions the ghost story might take".

Awards and recognition

 * 1985: Whitbread Prize for a First Novel for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
 * 1987: John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Passion
 * 1989: E. M. Forster Award for Sexing the Cherry
 * 1992: BAFTA Award for Best Drama for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit TV serial
 * 1994: Winner, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, for Written on the Body
 * 2006: Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2006 New Year Honours, for services to literature
 * 2013: Winner, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir or Biography, for Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
 * 2014: St. Louis Literary Award
 * 2016: Chosen as one of BBC's 100 Women.
 * 2016: Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
 * 2018: She presented the 42nd Richard Dimbleby Lecture in celebration of 100 years of women's suffrage in the UK
 * 2018: Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2018 Birthday Honours, for services to literature
 * 2019: Longlisted for the Booker Prize for Frankissstein: A Love Story

Personal life
Winterson came out as a lesbian at the age of 16. Her 1987 novel The Passion was inspired by her relationship with Pat Kavanagh, her literary agent. From 1990 to 2002, Winterson had a relationship with BBC radio broadcaster and academic Peggy Reynolds. After that ended, Winterson became involved with theatre director Deborah Warner. In 2015, she married psychotherapist Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue. The couple separated in 2019.