Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson, born Janet in Manchester on 27 August 1959, is an English author whose work belongs to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her fiction is closely associated with questions of gender, sexual identity, faith, storytelling, and, in later books, the relations between humans and technology. Her novels have been translated into almost 20 languages. She also broadcasts and teaches creative writing.

Winterson’s early life gave her writing much of its force. Her birth mother, a factory machinist from Blackley, gave birth to her at 17 and cared for her for six weeks in a mother and baby home. In January 1960, Jeanette was adopted by Constance and John William Winterson and taken to Accrington, Lancashire. The Wintersons were Pentecostal evangelical Christians, and Jeanette was raised in the Elim Pentecostal Church to become a missionary. She began evangelising and writing sermons while still young.

Books were scarce in the Winterson home. Her adoptive mother taught her to read through the Book of Deuteronomy, and Winterson later credited the Bible with teaching her a love of storytelling. There were only six books in the house, and secular influences were not allowed. Winterson read in secret, and at one point her adoptive mother found her books and burned them. She learned more about writing by reading English Literature in Prose A-Z in Accrington public library. At 16, after falling in love with a girl she had converted to her church, she left home and for a time lived in her Mini. She supported herself through A-levels with jobs including driving an ice-cream van, working at a funeral parlour, and working at a mental health hospital.

From 1978 to 1981, Winterson read English Literature at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, while supporting herself with odd jobs. After moving to London, she worked in theatre, including at the Roundhouse, and applied for work at Pandora Press, a feminist imprint founded in 1983 by Philippa Brewster. In 1985, Pandora published Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical story about a lesbian girl growing up in a Pentecostal community. Winterson wrote it by hand, mainly in the Reading Room of the British Museum. It won the Whitbread Prize for a First Novel.

The book soon reached a wider audience. In 1989, the BBC asked Winterson to adapt it for television, and the three-part drama was released in 1990. Directed by Beeban Kidron and produced by Philippa Giles, it won a BAFTA for best drama and for Film Sound, as well as RTS awards. Winterson won an award for scriptwriting at Cannes, and Geraldine McEwan won the BAFTA for best actress for playing the adoptive mother. Winterson later wrote the TV film Great Moments in Aviation, also directed by Kidron. In 2025, it was announced that the Royal Shakespeare Company was adapting Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit into a musical.

Winterson’s later books include The Passion, set in Napoleonic Europe, The Powerbook, set across Paris, Capri, and cyberspace, the children’s books The King of Capri and Tanglewreck, The Stone Gods, and the memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?. She has said, “My aim in writing is never just to give pleasure. Art isn’t a luxury product. It’s always about trying to change people’s lives.” That sense of art as active, personal, and demanding helps explain why her work still speaks to readers. Winterson has won major literary and screen awards, has received an OBE and CBE for services to literature, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.