Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson: The Girl Who Was Taught to Read by Deuteronomy

Her adoptive mother burned the books she read in secret. At sixteen, discovered in love with a girl she had personally converted to the Elim Pentecostal Church, she left home and lived in her Mini. Nine years later she published *Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit*, written by hand in the Reading Room of the British Museum, and won the Whitbread Prize for a first novel. The book has since sold more than a million copies in China alone.

Accrington

She was born Janet on August 27, 1959, in Manchester, and adopted on January 21, 1960, by Constance and John William Winterson, who were then thirty-seven and forty. They were Pentecostal evangelicals who brought her to Accrington in Lancashire and raised her to be a missionary. She was taught to read out of the Book of Deuteronomy, and she credits the Bible with giving her a love of storytelling — an unusually generous accounting from someone whose childhood it also structured and constrained.

Ice Cream Vans and Oxford

She attended Accrington Girls' Grammar School, then Accrington and Rossendale College for A-levels, paying her way by driving an ice-cream van, working in a funeral parlour, and working in a mental hospital. From 1978 to 1981 she read English at St Catherine's College, Oxford, supported by odd jobs throughout. Afterwards she worked in London theatre, including at the Roundhouse, and in 1983 took a job as editorial assistant at Pandora Press.

The First Book

*Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit* (1985) is the semi-autobiographical story of a girl raised in a Pentecostal community who discovers she is a lesbian. It won the Whitbread. In 1990 the BBC broadcast Winterson's own three-part adaptation, directed by Beeban Kidron; it won BAFTAs for Best Drama and Film Sound, Geraldine McEwan won Best Actress, and Winterson took a scriptwriting award at Cannes. In 2025 the Royal Shakespeare Company announced a musical version.

Refusing to Repeat Herself

Most writers would have spent a career mining that seam. Winterson went in the opposite direction almost immediately. *The Passion* (1987), a Napoleonic fable with a web-footed Venetian girl in it, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. *Sexing the Cherry* (1989) took the E. M. Forster Award. *Written on the Body* (1992) was narrated by a lover whose gender is never disclosed — a formal wager, sustained across an entire novel, that a reader's assumptions will do the work. It won a Lambda Literary Award. *Art & Lies* (1994), *Gut Symmetries* (1997), *The PowerBook* (2000), *Lighthousekeeping* (2004), *Weight* (2005) and *The Stone Gods* (2007) followed. She described *The PowerBook*, set across Paris, Capri and cyberspace, as "a gaudy, baroque, extravagant book, packing in everything I'd learned and felt since *Oranges*."

The Memoir

*Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?* (2011) is the non-fictional version of *Oranges*, and it omits twenty-five years — from her first year at university to 2007 — which is a structural decision as deliberate as anything in the novels. It won a Lambda Literary Award for lesbian memoir in 2013. She has spoken about attempting suicide in 2008 after the end of a relationship and the discovery of letters relating to her adoption, and credits poetry, writing and her friends with the recovery. She has reported hearing voices, in childhood and since.

The Later Work

*The Daylight Gate* (2012) took on the Pendle witch trials. *The Gap of Time* (2015) rewrote *The Winter's Tale*, her favourite Shakespeare play. *Frankissstein* (2019), longlisted for the Booker Prize, opens with Mary Shelley writing *Frankenstein* and then jumps to a present-day narrative featuring Ry Shelley, a transgender doctor, in order to run transhumanism, gender and artificial intelligence through the same machine. *12 Bytes* (2021) is essays on AI. *One Aladdin Two Lamps* appeared in 2025. Twenty-two books, translated into some twenty languages and published in twenty-seven territories.

Since 2012 she has been Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing, succeeding Colm Tóibín, where she teaches fiction workshops and runs a reading group. She was appointed OBE in 2006 and CBE in 2018, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2016, and holds honorary doctorates from Oxford, Manchester and Catalonia. Her portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. She has also spent years running Verde's, an organic food shop in a derelict Spitalfields terrace she bought and refurbished, and in January 2017 discussed closing it as its business rates rose from £21,500 to £54,000.

Why Jeanette Is Called a Genius

The Manchester description of her work is the useful one: her subject is how we turn *what is* into *what if?* That is not a stylistic preference but the operating principle of a body of work in which a Venetian girl's feet are webbed, a narrator has no gender, Mary Shelley shares a novel with a transgender doctor, and the Bible's cadences are turned against the church that installed them.

The faculty is transposition — taking a fixed structure and moving it where it does not belong to see what survives. Her declared influences did exactly that: Woolf, Eliot and Stein among the modernists, Calvino, Borges and Perec among the Europeans. "I tend to work obsessively with texts," she has said. "I embed them in my work." The gender-neutral narrator of *Written on the Body* was attempted in 1992 and has still not been improved on.

The counter-case has been made steadily since the mid-1990s. The experiments do not always land — *Art & Lies* was widely judged a failure of exactly the ambition being praised here — and the lyric register can tip into self-regard. Her public persona has drawn the charge of grandiosity for decades, and the major prizes have eluded her: *Frankissstein* was longlisted for the Booker, not shortlisted. She is a prose stylist of unusual gifts and a restless formal experimenter, and her best books are very good. That is more accurate than genius, and she does not need the larger word.

Legacy

Winterson made a queer working-class Lancashire childhood into English literature's furniture, then spent forty years refusing to be the author of that one book. The RSC musical of *Oranges* and her Manchester professorship represent, between them, the two halves of what she built: a story that entered the culture, and an institutional position from which to teach the next people how to make one.

Achievements

• Officer of the Order of the British Empire
• John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
• British Academy Television Award for Best Drama Series — 1991
• Commander of the Order of the British Empire
• Notable work: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
• Notable work: Sexing the Cherry
• Notable work: Gut Symmetries
• Notable work: The World and Other Places