 Jeanette
Winterson (born
August
27, 1959)
is a British novelist. Born in
Manchester, she was
adopted
by a
Pentecostal couple, who brought her up in
Accrington, Lancashire, with ambitions for her to be a
Christian missionary. She announced that she was having a
lesbian
affair at the age of 16, and left home. She went on to study
English at
St Catherine's College, Oxford. After moving to
London,
her first novel,
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published when she was
twenty-six years old. It won the 1985
Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, and was
adapted for television by Winterson in 1990, which in turn won the
BAFTA for Best Drama. She won the 1987
John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Passion, a novel set in
Napoleonic Europe.Jeanette 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. She received an OBE in the 2006 honours list. Her partner of 12 years until 2000 was Peggy Reynolds, the academic and BBC radio broadcaster. [1] Another influential previous girlfriend was Pat Kavanagh, her literary agent.
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