Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England, on August 27, 1959. She was raised in nearby Accrington, Lancashire, by adopted parents, John William and Costance Winterson. The Wintersons were devout Pentecostalists who raised Winterson in the Elim Pentecostal Church to become a Pentecostal missionary (she started writing sermons at the age of 6). After coming out as a lesbian in her teens, however, Winterson left her parents’ home and attended Accrington College of Further Education. She supported herself financially by working a series of odd jobs, many of which she references in her later writing. She subsequently attended St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and earned a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1981, after which she moved to London. She published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in 1985, at the age of 25. In it, she presents a fictionalized account of her own upbringing and coming-out in a homophobic, fundamentalist Christian community. The novel was awarded the Whitebread Prize for Best Fiction, and in 1990, Winterson also wrote a screenplay for a television film based on the novel, which received much critical acclaim. Since her initial groundbreaking success, Winterson has published more than 25 books of fiction and nonfiction, as well as several collections of short stories and illustrated children’s books. Some of Winterson’s most notable works include the novel The Passion (1987), which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for writers under 35 (and solidified Winterson’s reputation as a writer); Sexing the Cherry (1989), which won the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Written on the Body (1992); a memoir entitled Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011); and Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019), which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Since 2012, she has taught creative writing at the University of Manchester. Winterson was married to British psychoanalyst, author, and social critic Susie Orbach from 2015 to 2019.