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

Biography

Born in Manchester, she was adopted by a Pentecostal couple, who brought her up in Accrington, Lancashire, with ambitions for her to be a Christian missionary. She announced that she was having a lesbian affair at the age of 16, and left home. She went on to study English at St Catherine's College, Oxford. 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 for Best Drama. She won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Passion, a novel set in Napoleonic Europe.

Jeanette 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.

She received an OBE in the 2006 honours list.

Her partner of 12 years until 2000 was Peggy Reynolds, the academic and BBC radio broadcaster. Another influential previous girlfriend was Pat Kavanagh, her literary agent.

Winterson lives in Spitalfields, east London. She lives above her organic food shop, Verde's.

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)

References

External links

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