Jeanette Winterson (born 27 August 1959) is an English author. Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was a semi-autobiographical novel about a lesbian growing up in an English Pentecostal community. Other novels explore gender and sexual identity, and her later ones the relations between humans and technology. Her novels have been translated into almost 20 languages. She also broadcasts and teaches creative writing.

Winterson has won a Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, a BAFTA Award for Best Drama, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the St. Louis Literary Award, and the Lambda Literary Award twice. She has received an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to literature, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Early life and education

Jeanette Winterson (born Janet) She gave birth to Winterson when she was 17, and looked after her for the first six weeks of her life in a mother and baby home.

Winterson grew up in Accrington, and was raised in the Elim Pentecostal Church. There were only six books in the Winterson home, and Constance did not want her to have any secular influences.

Winterson attended Accrington Girls' Grammar School. When she left home, she had nowhere to live so lived in her Mini. Soon after, she attended Accrington and Rossendale College. She supported herself through her A-levels by driving an ice-cream van, working at a funeral parlour and a mental health hospital.

From 1978 to 1981, Winterson supported herself doing odd jobs while reading English Literature at St. Catherine's College, Oxford. There, she met life-long friend and actor, Vicky Licorish. a feminist imprint newly founded in 1983 by Philippa Brewster. In 1985, Brewster published Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson's first novel; a semi-autobiographical story about a lesbian girl growing up in a Pentecostal community. She wrote the book by hand, mainly in the Reading Room of the British Museum. It won the Whitbread Prize for a First Novel. Released in 1990, Winterson wrote the script for television and it was directed by Beeban Kidron and produced by Philippa Giles. and for Film Sound. It also won RTS awards, and Winterson won an award for scriptwriting at Cannes. The novel is also an English exam text.

2000 to present

In 2000, Winterson published The Powerbook, a novel set across Paris, Capri and cyberspace.

In 2006, Winterson was awarded an OBE for services to literature.

In 2009, Winterson donated the short story "Dog Days" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, covering four collections of UK stories by 38 authors. Her story appeared 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.

In 2011, Winterson published her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? The memoir misses out twenty-five years of Winterson's life, between her first year at university and 2007. It was announced that it would be published in the summer of 2011. However, Winterson's novella The Daylight Gate, based on the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials, appeared on their 400th anniversary in 2012. Its main character, Alice Nutter, is based on the real-life woman of the same name. The Guardians Sarah Hall describes the novel as: "the squalor, inequality and religious eugenics. The subjugation of women and prostituting of children. The degloving and castration of Catholics. Poverty. Sickness. Desperation."

In 2013, Winterson chaired the Forward Prize for Poetry alongside actor Sam West, journalist David Mills and poets Paul Farley and Sheenagh Pugh.

In 2013, it was announced that Winterson would be writing an adaptation of The Winter's Tale for the Hogarth Shakespeare series, a series of modern retellings of Shakespeare plays by well-known authors. She wrote The Gap of Time, published in 2015 by Vintage.

In 2016, Winterson published a book of short stories about Christmas alongside seasonal recipes from her celebrity friends, including Susie Orbach, Kathy Acker and Ruth Rendell.

In 2019, Winterson published her eleventh novel, Frankissstein. The novel explores topics including transhumanism, transgenderism and AI. It was published by Jonathan Cape.

In October 2023, Jonathan Cape published Night Side of the River, a book of thirteen ghost stories.

In 2025, Winterson published One Aladdin Two Lamps, "a dizzying whirligig of memoir, history, philosophy, politics and self-help, loosely tied to commentary on the Nights” (One Thousand and One Nights — a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales).

Teaching

In 2012, Winterson succeeded Colm Tóibín as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.

In December 2025, Winterson appeared in the docudrama Titanic Sinks Tonight, aired by BBC Two.

Winterson sees it as a writer's duty to be engaged in politics, and has spoken out on subjects including banking, Winterson has also supported campaigns promoting reading and literature in education, including the 2026 Department for Education initiative, the National Year of Reading. She confessed that she voted for both Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Tony Blair in 1997, and felt let down by both.

  • 1998: International Fiction Award, Mantua
  • 2013: Winner, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir or Biography, for Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
  • 2014: St. Louis Literary Award
  • 2016: Chosen as one of BBC's 100 Women.
  • 2016: Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
  • 2018: She presented the 42nd Richard Dimbleby Lecture in celebration of 100 years of women's suffrage in the UK
  • 2018: Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2018 Birthday Honours, for services to literature
  • 2019: Longlisted for the Booker Prize for Frankissstein: A Love Story

Personal life

Adoption

In her first year at Oxford university, Winterson returned to see her mother in Accrington for one last Christmas. From 1990 to 2002, Winterson had a relationship with BBC radio broadcaster and academic Peggy Reynolds, who left her marriage and lived with Winterson until 2002.

Aged 50, Winterson said that "I like the idea of people being fluid in their sexuality. I don't for instance consider myself to be a lesbian. I want to be beyond those descriptive constraints." She said that people see the main character as facing an issue to do with her sexuality, but she saw it as an issue with love. She said, at that time (2012), that she had had seven boyfriends.

In relation to her gender identity, Winterson has said that: She said poetry, writing and her friends (when she was able to talk) helped her find hope. She also has said she has heard voices during her life both in childhood and adulthood.

Winterson bought a derelict terraced house in Spitalfields, East London, which she refurbished into an occasional flat and a ground-floor shop, Verde's, to sell organic food. In January 2017, she discussed closing the shop when a spike in rateable value, and so business rates (which were set to rise from £21,500 to £54,000 in April 2017), threatened to make the business untenable.

In the 90s, after publishing Written on the Body, Winterson bought a large house in Highgate.

  • The Passion (1987)
  • Sexing the Cherry (1989)
  • Written on the Body (1992)
  • Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd (1994)
  • Gut Symmetries (1997)
  • The Dreaming House (1998)
  • The Powerbook (2000)
  • Lighthousekeeping (2004)
  • The Stone Gods (2007)
  • Ingenious (2009)
  • The Daylight Gate (2012)
  • The Gap of Time (2015)
  • Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere (2018)
  • Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019)

Short Stories

  • The World and Other Places (1998)
  • The Lion, The Unicorn and Me: The Donkey's Christmas Story (2009)
  • Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days (2016)
  • Night Side of the River: Ghost Stories (2023)

Children's Literature

  • The King of Capri (2003)
  • Tanglewreck (2006)
  • The Battle of the Sun (Tanglewreck #2)(2009)

Non-fiction

  • Fit for the Future: The Guide for Women Who Want to Live Well (1986)
  • Art Objects: Essays in Ecstasy and Effrontery (1995)
  • 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next (2021)
  • One Aladdin Two Lamps (2025)

Audiobooks

Read by the author:

  • Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2012) – Audible Studios
  • Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (2015) – Audible Studios
  • Christmas Days (2016) – Read with Imogen Church, Audible Studios
  • Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere (2019) – Canongate Books
  • 12 Bytes (2021) – Penguin Audio
  • Night Side of the River (2023) – Read with Vicky Licorish, Penguin Audio
  • One Aladdin Two Lamps (2025) – Read with Dana Haqjoo, Vintage Digital

Read by other:

  • The Daylight Gate (2012) – Read by Sian Thomas, Penguin Audio
  • Weight (2012) – Read by Dick Hill, Canongate Books
  • The Gap of Time (2015) – Read by Ben Onwukwe, Mark Bazeley, Penelope Rawlins, Vintage Digital
  • The Passion (2015) – Read by Daniel Pirrie, Tania Rodrigues, Audible Studios
  • Sexing the Cherry (2015) – Read by Juliet Stevenson, Audible Studios
  • Frankissstein (2019) – Read by John Sackville, Perdita Weeks and Harrison Knights, Vintage Digital

Winterson also recorded the afterward for The Living Mountain (2019) by Nan Shepherd, the preface to Nightwood (2017) by Djuna Barnes,

References

  • Jeanette Winterson author page by Guardian Unlimited
  • Guardian podcast interview (2007)
  • Rain Taxi interview (2005)
  • Guardian interview (2000)
  • 2012 radio interview (30 minutes) at The Bat Segundo Show