This Mancunian lesbian loves the word “lover”: She describes herself as not only a plain “lover” but also a “book lover, opera lover and nature lover” to her 37,000 followers on Twitter and is well known for exploring “gender polarities” and “sexual identities” in her works. Jeanette Winterson won the Whitbread prize with her first novel, Orange are Not the Only Fruit in 1985 and opened an organic deli and café named Verde’s beneath her Spitalfields home in the mid-1990s. In June 2014 she “sparked fury” by sharing pictures of a rabbit she killed and then cooked on Twitter and in 2009 she used the medium to propose to her partner, a psychoanalyst named Susie Orbach.