“Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.”
TRQ: Jeanette Winterson, Born August 27, 1959
Novelist, broadcaster and professor Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England on August 27, 1959. Her mother sewed overcoats for Marks and Spencer and gave her daughter up for adoption to Jack and Constance Winterson. Her adoptive parents practiced strict Pentecostal evangelism, which shaped Winterson’s writing.
At 16, Winterson came out as lesbian. She graduated from St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, where she supported herself through several odd jobs. She moved to London, where she worked at The Roundhouse theatre, with actress and producer Thelma Holt.
She once explained, “I did everything: wrote the programme notes, sold ice-cream, swept up, drove Thelma around, collated reviews and tried to sell advertising space to magazines like Time Out.”
In 1983, she interviewed for a job at Pandora Press, where she shared with literary agent Philippa Brewster an idea for an autobiographical novel about the relationship between a lesbian and her religious adoptive mother. Two years later, she published the book. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) won the Whitbread Award as the year’s best first novel.
Winterson weaves her characterization of her mother as complex, spiritual but also grotesque and larger than life, into the book’s experiments with themes of religion, love and sexuality that separated the novelist from other women writers at the time. Granta literary magazine and the Book Marketing Council named Winterson one of the 20 “Best of Young British Writers.”
Winterson’s work continued to experiment with form and theme. Boating for Beginners (1985) is a “comic book with pictures.” The Passion (1987) tells of Villanelle, a web-footed Venetian woman, and her adventures with one of Napoleon’s chefs. Sexing the Cherry (1989) is the story of Dog Woman and her adopted orphan.
In 1990, she adapted Oranges for BBC television, which won a BAFTA Award for Best Drama. Written on the Body (1992), Art and Lies (1994), and Gut Symmetries (1997) explore relationship triangles, sexual identity and gender experimentation. She also wrote the television screenplay Great Moments in Aviation (1994) for BBC2. After editing a series of Virginia Woolf novels in 2000, Winterson adapted a stage version of The PowerBook (2002) for the Royal National Theatre.
In 2006, she was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), for her contributions to literature. In 2009, Winterson met psychoanalyst and writer Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue and Impossibility of Sex. The two became romantically involved and married in 2015. In 2011, she published her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? In 2016 the BBC named her to their “100 Women” list and she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2018 she was honored as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
Jeanette continues to live in the Cotswolds and is a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. She has published her work in 18 countries.
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