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. One job Winterson applied for was as an editorial assistant at Pandora Press,[11] a feminist imprint newly founded in 1983 by Philippa Brewster, and in 1985 Brewster published Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which won the Whitbread Prize for a First Novel.[7] Winterson adapted it for television in 1990. Her novel The Passion was set in Napoleonic Europe.[12]
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 an occasional flat and a ground-floor shop, Verde's, to sell organic food.[13][14][15] In January 2017, she discussed closing the shop when a spike in rateable value, and so business rates, threatened to make the business untenable.[16][17][18]
In 2009, Winterson donated the short story "Dog Days" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, covering four collections of UK stories by 38 authors. Her story appeared in the Fire collection.[19] She also supported the relaunch of the Bush Theatre in London's Shepherd's Bush. She wrote and performed work for the Sixty Six Books project, based on a chapter of the King James Bible, along with other novelists and poets including Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy, Anne Michaels and Catherine Tate.[20][21]
Winterson's 2012 novella The Daylight Gate, based on the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials, appeared on their 400th anniversary. Its main character, Alice Nutter, is based on the real-life woman of the same name. 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. It's also like courtroom reportage, sworn witness testimony. 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. You're not asked to believe in magic. Magic exists. A severed head talks. A man is transmogrified into a hare. The story is stretched as tight as a rack, so the reader's disbelief is ruptured rather than suspended. And if doubt remains, the text's sensuality persuades."[22]
In 2012, Winterson succeeded Colm Tóibín as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.[23]
Her 2019 novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story, was longlisted for the Booker Prize.[24]
In October 2023, Jonathan Cape published Night Side of the River. 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".[25]
