Jeanette Winterson | |
---|---|
Born | Manchester, England, UK |
Occupation | Writer, journalist, Professor at the University of Manchester |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | St. Catherine's College, Oxford |
Period | 1985–present |
Genre | Fiction, children's fiction, journalism, science fiction |
Notable works | Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit |
Spouse | |
Partner | Peggy Reynolds (1990–2002) |
Website | |
www |
Jeanette Winterson CBE FRSL is an English author.
Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit , was a semi-autobiographical novel about a lesbian growing up in an English Pentecostal community. Other novels explore gender polarities and sexual identity and later ones the relations between humans and technology. She broadcasts and teaches creative writing. She has won a Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, a BAFTA Award for Best Drama, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the St. Louis Literary Award, and the Lambda Literary Award twice. She has received an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to literature, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her novels have been translated to almost 20 languages. [2]
Winterson was born in Manchester and adopted by Constance and John William Winterson on 21 January 1960. [3] She grew up in Accrington, Lancashire, and was raised in the Elim Pentecostal Church. She was raised to become a Pentecostal Christian missionary, and she began evangelising and writing sermons at the age of six. [4] [5]
By the age of 16, Winterson had come out as a lesbian and left home. [6] [7] [8] She soon after attended Accrington and Rossendale College, [9] and supported herself at a variety of odd jobs while studying English at St. Catherine's College, Oxford (1978–1981). [7] [10]
After she moved to London, she took assorted theatre work, including at the Roundhouse, [7] and wrote her debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit , a semi-autobiographical story about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against convention. One job Winterson applied for was as an editorial assistant at Pandora Press, [11] a feminist imprint newly founded in 1983 by Philippa Brewster, and in 1985 Brewster published Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which won the Whitbread Prize for a First Novel. [7] Winterson adapted it for television in 1990. Her novel The Passion was set in Napoleonic Europe. [12]
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 an occasional flat and a ground-floor shop, Verde's, to sell organic food. [13] [14] [15] In January 2017, she discussed closing the shop when a spike in rateable value, and so business rates, threatened to make the business untenable. [16] [17] [18]
In 2009, Winterson donated the short story "Dog Days" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, covering four collections of UK stories by 38 authors. Her story appeared in the Fire collection. [19] She also supported the relaunch of the Bush Theatre in London's Shepherd's Bush. She wrote and performed work for the Sixty Six Books project, based on a chapter of the King James Bible, along with other novelists and poets including Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy, Anne Michaels and Catherine Tate. [20] [21]
Winterson's 2012 novella The Daylight Gate, based on the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials, appeared on their 400th anniversary. Its main character, Alice Nutter, is based on the real-life woman of the same name. The Guardian's Sarah Hall describes the work:
"the narrative voice is irrefutable; this is old-fashioned storytelling, with a sermonic tone that commands and terrifies. It's also like courtroom reportage, sworn witness testimony. The sentences are short, truthful – and dreadful.... Absolutism is Winterson's forte, and it's the perfect mode to verify supernatural events when they occur. You're not asked to believe in magic. Magic exists. A severed head talks. A man is transmogrified into a hare. The story is stretched as tight as a rack, so the reader's disbelief is ruptured rather than suspended. And if doubt remains, the text's sensuality persuades." [22]
In 2012, Winterson succeeded Colm Tóibín as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. [23]
Her 2019 novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. [24]
In October 2023, Jonathan Cape published Night Side of the River. Suzi Feay, writing for Literary Review, said: "In these enjoyable tales Winterson has ably served the genre, while also sketching some unsettling future directions the ghost story might take". [25]
Winterson came out as a lesbian at the age of 16. [6] Her 1987 novel The Passion was inspired by her relationship with Pat Kavanagh, her literary agent. [37] From 1990 to 2002, Winterson had a relationship with BBC radio broadcaster and academic Peggy Reynolds. [38] After that ended, Winterson became involved with theatre director Deborah Warner. In 2015, she married psychotherapist Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue. [39] The couple separated in 2019. [40]
Zadie Smith FRSL is a British novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
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Sarah Ann Waters is a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.
Charlotte Ninon Coleman was an English actress best known for playing Scarlett in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, Jess in the television drama Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and her childhood roles of Sue in Worzel Gummidge and the character Marmalade Atkins.
Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin (2000) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room was adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a novel by Jeanette Winterson published in 1985 by Pandora Press. It is a coming-of-age story about a lesbian who grows up in an English Pentecostal community. Key themes of the book include transition from youth to adulthood, complex family relationships, same-sex relationships, organised religion and the concept of faith.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a 1990 BBC television drama miniseries, directed by Beeban Kidron. Jeanette Winterson wrote the screenplay, adapting her semi-autobiographical first novel of the same name. The BBC produced and screened three episodes, running to a total of 2 hours and 45 minutes. The series was released on DVD in 2005.
Anna "Nan" Shepherd was a Scottish Modernist writer and poet, best known for her seminal mountain memoir, The Living Mountain, based on experiences of hill walking in the Cairngorms. This is noted as an influence by nature writers who include Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey. She also wrote poetry and three novels set in small fictional communities in Northern Scotland. The landscape and weather of this area played a major role in her novels and provided a focus for her poetry. Shepherd served as a lecturer in English at the Aberdeen College of Education for most of her working life.
Ali Smith CBE FRSL is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting".
Patricia Olive "Pat" Kavanagh was a British literary agent.
Lesbian literature is a subgenre of literature addressing lesbian themes. It includes poetry, plays, fiction addressing lesbian characters, and non-fiction about lesbian-interest topics.
Great Moments in Aviation is a 1994 British romantic drama film set on a 1950s passenger liner. The film follows Gabriel Angel, a young Caribbean aviator who falls in love with the forger Duncan Stewart on her journey to England. Stewart is pursued by his nemesis Rex Goodyear, and the group are supported by Dr Angela Bead and Miss Gwendolyn Quim, retired missionaries who become lovers during the voyage.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest (2002), and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
Maria Joan Hyland is an ex-lawyer and the author of three novels: How the Light Gets In (2004), Carry Me Down (2006) and This is How (2009). Hyland is a lecturer in creative writing in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. Carry Me Down (2006) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Hawthornden Prize and the Encore Prize.
Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.
Maya Jaggi is a British writer, literary critic, editor and cultural journalist. In the words of the Open University, from which Jaggi received an honorary doctorate in 2012, she "has had a transformative influence in the last 25 years in extending the map of international writing today". Jaggi has been a contributor to a wide range of publications including The Guardian, Financial Times, The Independent, The Literary Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, New Statesman, Wasafiri, Index on Censorship, and Newsweek, and is particularly known for her profiles of writers, artists, film-makers, musicians and others. She is also a broadcaster and presenter on radio and television. Jaggi is the niece of actor and food writer Madhur Jaffrey.
Lighthousekeeping is a 2004 novel by Jeanette Winterson. The novel depicts the perilous unbalanced psychology of the narrating character Silver, who becomes an apprentice to a lighthouse keeper. and follows in Winterson's typically mythological and metaphorical writing, exploring themes of storytelling, love and history.
The Lesser Bohemians is the second novel by Eimear McBride. It was published on 1 September 2016 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2017.
Frankissstein: A Love Story is a 2019 novel by Jeanette Winterson. It was published on 28 May 2019 by Jonathan Cape. The novel employs speculative fiction and historical fiction to reimagine Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein (1818). The story switches between Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein in Geneva, Switzerland in 1816 and the story of Ry Shelley, a transgender doctor and Victor Stein, a transhumanist, who become involved in the world of artificial intelligence and cryonics in present-day Brexit-era Britain.