Jeannette Winterson author page

Jeanette Winterson biography

Jeanette Winterson is an English writer whose work spans adult fiction, children’s literature, memoir and essays. She was born in Manchester and adopted by Constance and John Winterson in Accrington, Lancashire.

She studied English at St Catharine’s College, Oxford, supporting herself with various jobs before publishing her first novel. Her debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), won the Whitbread Prize for a first novel and was adapted into a BBC television serial, which won a BAFTA Award.

Winterson has published novels including The Passion (1987), Sexing the Cherry (1989), Written on the Body (1992), and The Gap of Time (2015), a reimagining of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. She also writes children’s fiction, with titles such as The King of Capri (2003), Tanglewreck (2006), and Ingenious for BBC Television.

Winterson holds a professorship in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, a post she has held since 2012. In 2006 she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), and in 2018 she was promoted to Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to literature.

In 2023 she published a collection of ghost stories, Night Side of the River.