Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson is a British novelist, essayist, and memoirist. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first book — Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). The novel won the Whitbread Book Awards for First Novel. Later it was adapted for BBC television.

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London, where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press.

Winterson has written numerous novels, Boating for Beginners (1985), published after Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and described by the author as "a comic book with pictures"; The Passion (1987), twin narratives following the adventures of the web-footed daughter of a Venetian gondolier and Napoleon's chicken chef; Sexing the Cherry (1989), an invented world set during the English Civil War featuring the fabulous "Dog Woman" and the orphan she raises. And three books exploring triangular relationships, gender, and formal experimentation: Written on the Body (1992), Art and Lies (1994), and Gut Symmetries (1997).

Her works often explore themes like gender, love, identity, and the boundaries of fiction and reality. Winterson's writing is known for its poetic language, inventive storytelling, and exploration of LGBTQ+ themes.

Jeanette Winterson also wrote Great Moments in Aviation, a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. She is also the editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage.

Winterson regularly contributes reviews and articles to newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001. She also writes stories for children, e.g., The King of Capri (2003) and Tanglewreck (2006).

In addition to her novels, Jeanette Winterson has published collections of short stories, essays, and non-fiction works. She won several significant awards, including the E. M. Forster Award and the Lambda Literary Award.

In 2006, Jeanette Winterson was awarded an OBE. In 2018, she was honored with CBE.

“...life always feels like an emergency zone, and the time we spend with a book or a poem or making time to look at a picture or go to the theatre is not just time for ourselves, though it is that, it is claiming a different kind of order in our lives. Balance, curiosity, reflection, creativity," Winterson says.

Jeanette Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London.

Photo credit: www.jeanettewinterson.com