Jeanette Winterson

Professor of New Writing at the Centre for New Writing.

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England, and adopted by Pentecostal parents who brought her up in the nearby mill-town of Accrington. After reading English at Oxford University she wrote her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, when she was 23. It was published a year later in 1985.

Since then, she has published more than a dozen books including the memoir 'Why be happy when you could be normal?' and 'The Daylight Gate', and has won various awards around the world for her fiction and adaptations, including the Whitbread Prize, UK, and the Prix d'argent, Cannes Film Festival.

In 2006 Jeanette Winterson was awarded an OBE for services to literature. She writes regularly for various UK newspapers, especially The Times and The Guardian. She was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester in September 2012. 

In 2018, she was awarded a CBE for services to literature.

Find out more about Jeanette Winterson by visiting her website.

A selection of Jeanette's fiction

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  The Gap of Time

  The Gap of Time is Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.

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  Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

  Jeanette's first novel was adapted for radio in 2016 for BBC Radio 4.

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  Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

  Published in 2011, Winterson has described this as the silent twin of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.

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  The Passion

  ‘It’s a fantasy, a vivid dream… inventive and brilliant’ - The Guardian.

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  12 Bytes

  12 provocative essays on the implications of artificial intelligence, published in 2021.

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  Frankissstein

  Inspired by Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein, this novel is about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire.