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Jeanette Winterson OBE (born August 27, 1959) is a British novelist. Born in Manchester, she was adopted by a Pentecostal couple, who brought her up in Accrington, Lancashire, with ambitions for her to be a Christian missionary. She announced that she was having a lesbian affair at the age of 16, and left home. She went on to study English at St Catherine's College, Oxford. After moving to London, her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit , was published when she was twenty-six years old. It won the 1985 Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, and was adapted for television by Winterson in 1990, which in turn won the BAFTA for Best Drama. She won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Passion, a novel set in Napoleonic Europe. Jeanette 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 a flat as a pied-a-terre and a ground-floor shop, Verde's, to sell organic food. She received an OBE in the 2006 honours list. Her partner of 12 years until 2000 was Peggy Reynolds, the academic and BBC radio broadcaster. Another influential previous girlfriend was Pat Kavanagh, her literary agent.
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