Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson OBE
Winterson in Warsaw, Poland, 2005
Born	(1959-08-27) 27 August 1959 Manchester, England
Occupation	Writer, journalist, delicatessen owner
Nationality	British
Period	1985–present
Genre	Fiction, children's fiction, journalism, science fiction
Notable works	Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Spouse	Susie Orbach (from 2015)
Partner	Peggy Reynolds (1990-2002)
Website
www.jeanettewinterson.com

Jeanette Winterson, OBE (born 27 August 1959) is an award-winning English writer, who became famous with her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against conventional values. Some of her other novels have explored gender polarities and sexual identity. Winterson is also a broadcaster and a professor of creative writing.

Early life

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. Intending to become a Pentecostal Christian missionary, she began evangelising and writing sermons at age six.

By the age of 16 Winterson had identified herself as a lesbian and left home. She soon after attended Accrington and Rossendale College, and supported herself at a variety of odd jobs while reading English at St Catherine's College, Oxford.

Career

After she moved to London, her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, won the 1985 Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, and was adapted for television by Winterson in 1990. This in turn won the BAFTA Award for Best Drama. She won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Passion, a novel 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 a flat as a pied-à-terre and a ground-floor shop, Verde's, to sell organic food.

In 2009, she donated the short story Dog Days to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project comprising four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Winterson's story was published 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.

Her 2012 novella, The Daylight Gate, based on the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials, was published on the 400th anniversary of the trials. The novella's 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, she succeeded Colm Tóibín as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester.

Awards and recognition

Winterson was made an officer of Order of the British Empire (OBE) at the 2006 New Year Honours "For services to literature".

She is a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Awards. Written on the Body won in the category of Lesbian Fiction in 1994, and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? won in the category of Lesbian Memoir or Biography in 2013. Additionally, Winterson's book Sexing the Cherry won the 1989 E. M. Forster Award.

Personal life

Since coming out as a lesbian at the age of 16, Winterson has had a number of significant relationships. Her 1987 novel The Passion was inspired by her affair with Pat Kavanagh, her literary agent. From 1990 to 2002, Winterson was involved with BBC radio broadcaster and academic Peggy Reynolds. After their relationship ended, Winterson became involved with theatre director Deborah Warner. In 2015 she married psychotherapist Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue.

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

• Boating for Beginners (1985) - graphic novel
• Fit For The Future: The Guide for Women Who Want to Live Well (1986)
• The Passion (1987)
• Sexing the Cherry (1989)
• Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit: the script (1990)
• Written on the Body (1992)
• Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd (1994)
• Great Moments in Aviation: the script (1995)
• Art Objects. Essays in Ecstasy and Effrontery (1995) - essays
• Gut Symmetries (1997)
• The World and Other Places (1998) - short stories
• The PowerBook (2000)
• The King of Capri (2003) - children's literature
• Lighthousekeeping (2004)
• Weight (2005)
• Tanglewreck (2006) - children's literature
• The Stone Gods (2007)
• The Battle of the Sun (2009)
• Ingenious (2009)
• The Lion, The Unicorn and Me: The Donkey's Christmas Story (2009)
• Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011) - memoir
• The Daylight Gate (2012)

External links

• Jeanette Winterson official website
• Jeanette Winterson author page by Guardian Unlimited
• Guardian podcast interview (2007)
• Rain Taxi interview (2005)
• Guardian interview (2000)
• An extended autobiographical article in The Guardian, Friday 28 October 2011: Retrieved 1 November 2011.
• 2012 radio interview (30 minutes) at The Bat Segundo Show
• Jeanette Winterson at the Internet Movie Database