Background

Jeanette Winterson was born on August 27, 1959, in Manchester, United Kingdom. She was adopted by Constance and John William Winterson on 21 January 1960. Jeanette’s new parents were Pentecostals - a religious evangelical group who read the Bible more or less literally, and believe in the Second Coming of Christ and the End of the World.

Education

Jeanette studied English at St Catherine's College, Oxford.

Career

After graduating, Jeanette worked in the theatre for a while, at London’s The Roundhouse with the legendary Thelma Holt. In 1983, at a job interview at the newly formed Pandora Press, Jeanette started telling the boss interviewing her about her idea for a novel called Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. The boss was Philippa Brewster. She said, ‘If you write it the way you tell it, I’ll buy it.’ Jeanette didn’t get the job but she did write the novel and Oranges was published in 1985. It concerns the relationship between a young lesbian and her adoptive mother, a religious fanatic. The novel was a word-of-mouth success round the independent bookshops. After that she was able to write full-time, doing casual work to plug the gaps. By 1987, when The Passion was published, she was earning enough from her work and have done so ever since. Winterson's subsequent novels explore the boundaries of physicality and the imagination, gender polarities, and sexual identities.

In 1994 Jeanette did two things; left London to live in the Cotswolds, where she still lives, and bought a derelict building in Spitalfields - London’s East End. At that time few people lived around the old fruit and veg market. Over 2 years Jeanette rebuilt her building, and later put a shop back on the ground floor where it had been, on and off, since 1810. The shop Verde’s is still owned by Jeanette, and run by Harvey Cabaniss, who has made it into a successful business.

Winterson's stage adaptation of The PowerBook in 2002 opened at the Royal National Theatre, London. In 2009, she donated the short story "Dog Days" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, which comprised 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. Since 2012 Jeanette is also Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester.

Achievements

• Jeanette Winterson is an award-winning writer. She became famous with her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which won the Whitbread Award as the best first novel of 1985.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

    (It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of ...)

    2011
  • Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

    (Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted...)

    1985
  • The Gap of Time

    (In The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of...)

    2015
  • Gut Symmetries

    (One starry night on a boat in the mid-Atlantic, Alice, a ...)

    1997
  • The Stone Gods

    (On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet -...)

    2007
  • Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

    (With wit and verve, Whitbread Award–winning novelist Jean...)

    2005
  • Frankissstein

    (Is is an audacious love story that weaves together dispar...)

    2019
  • Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

    (In these ten intertwined essays, one of our most provocat...)

    1995
  • The Daylight Gate

    (After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, every Catholic conspira...)

    2012
  • The Passion

    (A magical, wonderful modern classic about the destinies o...)

    1987
  • Sexing the Cherry

    (In a fantastic world that is and is not seventeenth-centu...)

    1989
  • Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere

    (It is a timely and inspiring call to arms by one of Brita...)

    2018
  • Written on the Body

    (The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the aut...)

    1992
  • Lighthousekeeping

    (Lighthousekeeping tells the tale of Silver, an orphaned g...)

    2004

Personality

Jeanette grows a lot of her own food and is a partner in a small herd of rare breed sheep - the Lions of the Wold.

Connections

Jeanette married psychotherapist Susie Orbach in 2015.

Spouse:

Susie Orbach

foster-father:

John William Winterson

foster-mother:

Constance Winterson