Jeanette Winterson
Professor of New Writing at the Centre for New Writing.
Jeanette Winterson CBE is the author of 22 books - novels, short stories, essays, critical commentary, and cover versions.
Her latest, One Aladdin Two Lamps, takes the text of the Thousand and One Nights to discuss how we avoid getting lost in the literal. How we turn what is into what if?
Jeanette Winterson’s work is published in 27 territories. Her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985) was scripted by her into A BAFTA winning BBC drama. She is now turning it into a musical with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The novel has sold over a million copies in China.
Jeanette Winterson has accepted Honorary Doctorates from the universities of Oxford, (where she was educated), Manchester, and Catalonia.
Born in Manchester and adopted by Pentecostal evangelists, she left home early, lived in a car, and stayed on a mission to promote the power of reading, of creativity, of the life of the mind.
Her portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
A selection of Jeanette's fiction
The Gap of Time
The Gap of Time is Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Jeanette's first novel was adapted for radio in 2016 for BBC Radio 4.
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.
The Passion
‘It’s a fantasy, a vivid dream… inventive and brilliant’ - The Guardian.
12 Bytes
12 provocative essays on the implications of artificial intelligence, published in 2021.
Frankissstein
Inspired by Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein, this novel is about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire.