Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette Winterson, Warsaw, Poland, 16 February 2005
Born	27 August 1959 (1959-08-27) (age 50) Manchester, England
Occupation	Novelist, Journalist, Delicatessen owner
Nationality	British
Writing period	1985-
Genres	Fiction, Children's fiction, Journalism, Science fiction
Notable work(s)	Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Influences The Bible, Thomas Malory, Virginia Woolf, Tove Jansson, T. S. Eliot
Influenced Sarah Waters, Susan Hill
Official website

Jeanette Winterson OBE (born 27 August 1959) is a British novelist.

Biography

Early years

Winterson was born in Manchester and raised in Accrington, Lancashire, by adopted parents Constance and John William Winterson. On track to becoming a Pentecostal Christian missionary, she began evangelising and writing sermons at age six, but by sixteen Winterson declared she was lesbian and left home.^[1] She soon after attended Accrington and Rossendale College and supported herself at a variety of odd jobs while reading for a degree in English at St Catherine's College, Oxford.

Career

After moving to London, her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published when she was twenty-four years old. It won the 1985 Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, and was adapted for television by Winterson in 1990, which 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-a-terre and a ground-floor shop, Verde's, to sell organic food.^[2]

Winterson was made an officer of Order of the British Empire (OBE) at the 2006 New Year Honours.

In 2009, she donated the short story Dog Days to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Winterson's story was published in the 'Fire' collection.^[3]

Personal life

In 2002, Winterson ended her twelve-year relationship with BBC radio broadcaster and academic, Peggy Reynolds.^[4] Her novel Written on the Body was inspired by an affair with her literary agent, Pat Kavanagh.^[5]

Bibliography

• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)
• Boating for Beginners (1985)
• 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 (1995)
• Gut Symmetries (1997)
• The World and Other Places (1998)
• The PowerBook (2000)
• The King of Capri (2003)
• Lighthousekeeping (2004)
• Weight (2005)
• Tanglewreck (2006)
• The Stone Gods (2007)
• The Battle of the Sun (2009)

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jeanette Winterson

• Jeanette Winterson official website
• Jeanette Winterson author page by Guardian Unlimited
• Guardian podcast interview (2007)
• Rain Taxi interview (2005)
• Guardian interview (2000)
• Salon interview (1997)
• Interview with Ramona Koval on her Sydney Writers' Festival 2008 Opening Address,'Get a book, get a life: How words create meaning' - The Book Show, ABC Radio National , 1 June 2008
• Interview on The Stone Gods with Ramona Koval on The Book Show, ABC Radio National , Oct 23, 2007