English writer Jeanette Winterson was BOTD in 1959. Born in Manchester, she was adopted as a baby by a Pentecostal Christian couple and raised to be an evangelical preacher. She came out as a lesbian in her teens and left home, winning a place to study English at Oxford University. Her unusual childhood informed her 1985 debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which became a publishing sensation, winning the Whitbread First Novel Award and adapted by Winterson for television. Now read as a set text in British secondary schools, it is considered a classic of LGBTQ literature. Her follow-up novel The Passion was inspired by her affair with her literary agent Pat Kavanagh. Subsequent novels Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body and Art and Lies were energetic if pretentious combinations of historical fiction, magic realism and lesbian erotica. By the 1990s, she became the go-to lesbian for spicy contributions to radio and broadsheet media, frequently naming her own work in end-of-year Best Books lists. Her 2000 novel The Powerbook was adapted into a stage play, directed by her then-partner Deborah Warner. Her 2011 memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, revisited her childhood narrative, with a more sober, post-therapeutic tone, inspired by her relationship with celebrity psychotherapist Susie Orbach. She and Orbach married in 2015, separating four years later. Her recent works include Frankisstein: A Love Story, a pastiche of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She lived for many years in a restored 18th century hours in Spitalfields, East London, briefly opening a fruit and vegetable store on the ground floor (selling oranges and other fruit). Winterson has homes in Z Oxfordshire and London, and is a professor of creative writing at Manchester University. Her current relationship status is unknown, but is sure to turn up, lightly fictionalised, in her next novel.