Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette Winterson, Warsaw, Poland, 16 February 2005
Born	27 August 1959 (1959-08-27) Manchester, England
Occupation	Novelist, journalist, delicatessen owner
Nationality	British
Period	1985–
Genres	Fiction, children's fiction, journalism, science fiction
Notable work(s)	Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Partner(s)	Peggy Reynolds (1990-2002), Deborah Warner, Susie Orbach
Influences The Bible, Thomas Malory, Virginia Woolf, Tove Jansson, T. S. Eliot
Influenced Sarah Waters, Susan Hill
www.jeanettewinterson.com

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

Early years

Winterson was born in Manchester and adopted on 21 January 1960. She was raised in Accrington, Lancashire, by Constance and John William Winterson. She was raised in the Elim Pentecostal Church and, intending to become a Pentecostal Christian missionary, she began evangelising and writing sermons at age six.

By age 16 Winterson realised she was a lesbian and left home. 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, 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-a-terre and a ground-floor shop, Verde's, to sell organic food.

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 comprising 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 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.

Personal life

In 2002, Winterson ended her 12-year relationship with BBC radio broadcaster and academic, Peggy Reynolds. Since then she has been involved with theatre director Deborah Warner and therapist Susie Orbach. Her novel The Passion was inspired by her affair with Pat Kavanagh, her literary agent.

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)
• Ingenious (2009)
• The Lion, The Unicorn and Me: The Donkey's Christmas Story (2009)
• The Battle of the Sun (2010)
• Why be happy when you could be normal? (2011)

External links

• Jeanette Winterson official website
• Jeanette Winterson author page by Guardian Unlimited
• Audrey Bilger (Winter 1997). "Jeanette Winterson, The Art of Fiction No. 150". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1188/the-art-of-fiction-no-150-jeanette-winterson. 
• 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, 23 Oct 2007
• An extended autobiographical article in The Guardian, Friday 28 October 2011: Retrieved 1 November 2011.