This is an accepted version of this page Jeanette Winterson CBE FRSL (born 27 August 1959)[citation needed] 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.

[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.

[13] Winterson's subsequent novels explore the boundaries of physicality and the imagination, gender polarities, and sexual identities, and have won several literary awards.

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.

Winterson's 2012 novella The Daylight Gate, based on the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials, appeared on their 400th anniversary.

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.

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.

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".