Nationality British Role Writer | Name Jeanette Winterson Period 1985–present | |
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Occupation Writer, journalist, delicatessen owner Genre Fiction, children's fiction, journalism, science fiction Parents Constance Winterson, John William Winterson Books Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Why be Happy When Yo, Written on the Body, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry Similar People Susie Orbach, Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, Sarah Waters, Don Paterson | ||
Jeanette winterson at sydney opera house for sydney writers festival 2012
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. She is a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, which focuses on LGBT issues.
Contents
- Jeanette winterson at sydney opera house for sydney writers festival 2012
- Jeanette winterson women writers voices in transition 4 4
- Early life
- Career
- Awards and recognition
- Personal life
- References
Jeanette winterson women writers voices in transition 4 4
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 came out 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, 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.
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, Winterson 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.
In 2016, she was chosen as one of BBC's 100 Women.
Personal life
Winterson came out as a lesbian at the age of 16. 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.