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Sapphic romance

Jeanette Winterson

born 1959

Author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the Body.

Born
27 August 1959 · Manchester, England
Nationality
English
  • coming-of-age
  • lesbian fiction
  • memoir
  • retellings

A reference author. Valice Press has no connection with Jeanette Winterson, their publishers or their estate. Jeanette Winterson appears here as part of the reading context around the shelf.

Biography

The life, briefly

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester and adopted as a baby by a Pentecostal family in Accrington, Lancashire. At sixteen she fell in love with a girl and left home; she supported herself with odd jobs and then read English Literature at St Catherine's College, Oxford from 1978 to 1981.

Her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), is a semi-autobiographical story of a lesbian girl growing up in an English Pentecostal community. Her later novels explore gender and sexual identity and, more recently, the relations between humans and technology. Her books have been translated into almost twenty languages.

Works

Major works

  1. 1985Oranges Are Not the Only Fruitwon the Whitbread Prize for a First Novel; she scripted the 1990 BBC drama
  2. 1989Sexing the Cherry
  3. 1992Written on the Body
  4. 2004Lighthousekeeping
  5. 2011Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?a memoir
  6. 2019Frankissstein: A Love Storybegins with Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein and jumps to the present

Timeline

Turning points

  1. 1960

    Adopted on 21 January by Constance and John William Winterson of Accrington.

  2. 1985

    Published Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, her first novel.

  3. 1990

    The BBC broadcast her three-part adaptation of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which won a BAFTA Award for Best Drama.

  4. 2006

    Awarded an OBE for services to literature.

  5. 2011

    Published the memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

  6. 2019

    Published Frankissstein, her eleventh novel.

Why they are here

Jeanette Winterson and the shelf

Relevance

Oranges is the best-known British coming-out novel of the 1980s, and the lesbian heroine's struggle with a religious community that defines love for her is told with humour. Winterson's later work pushes the borders of the novel; Frankissstein even reaches back to Mary Shelley.

Influence

She has won the Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Lambda Literary Award twice, and holds an OBE and a CBE for services to literature.

Nearby on the shelf

If you read this, you might look here

These are Valice Press titles from the same part of the library. They are not by Jeanette Winterson, and they are not a recommendation on Jeanette Winterson’s behalf — only the same shelf.

Related authors

Read alongside

Sources

Where this comes from

Everything on this page about Jeanette Winterson is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.