Joanne Harris

Biography

Harris was born in Barnsley in Yorkshire, to an English father and a French mother. Her parents were both academics, teaching modern languages and literature at a local grammar school. Her first language was French which caused divisions between her English family, where no-one spoke French, and her French family, where no-one spoke English. Both families had turbulent histories and a tradition of strong women, kitchen gardening, storytelling, folklore and cookery.

Early life

Harris began writing at an early age. She was strongly influenced by Grimms' Fairy Tales and Charles Perrault's work, as well as local folklore and Norse mythology. She was educated at Wakefield Girls' High School, Barnsley Sixth Form College, and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where she studied modern and medieval languages.

After a single, unsuccessful year as an accountant, which she describes as "like being trapped in a Terry Gilliam movie", she trained as a teacher at Sheffield University, and for fifteen years she taught modern languages, mostly at Leeds Grammar School, a boys' independent school in Yorkshire. She also taught at Sheffield University, lecturing on aspects of French literature and film. During this period, she worked on a number of book projects.

The Evil Seed, Sleep, Pale Sister and Chocolat were published before she retired from teaching to become an author full-time.

Books

Her first novel, The Evil Seed, was published in 1989, with only limited success. A second novel, Sleep, Pale Sister, shows the way in which her style developed from horror-pastiche to literary ghost story. In 1999, her third novel, Chocolat, a darkly magical modern folk-tale, thematically based on food and set in the Gers region of France, reached No. 1 in the Sunday Times' bestseller list. The book won the Creative Freedom Award in 1999 and was shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award. The film rights were sold to David Brown and developed by Miramax Pictures. The success of the motion picture, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, brought Harris worldwide recognition, and in 2012 she became one of only four female members of the "Millionaires' Club," the elite group of authors who have achieved a million sales of one book in the UK since records began.

Since Chocolat, all of Harris's books have been UK bestsellers. Her wide-ranging choice of subject matter means that her work often defies categorization, and she has a predilection for difficult or challenging issues. She has written two more novels in the Chocolat series, continuing the adventures of Vianne Rocher; The Lollipop Shoes (re-titled The Girl With No Shadow in the US) and Peaches for Monsieur le Curé (Peaches for Father Francis in the US), as well as two French cookbooks (co-written with Fran Warde), two collections of short stories and a number of dark psychological thrillers, including Gentlemen and Players and Blueeyedboy.

In August 2007 she published Runemarks, a mythpunk/fantasy novel based on Norse mythology, aimed at both children and adults. The sequel, Runelight, was published in 2011, and since then, the Rune books have acquired an enthusiastic following alongside the fans of Vianne Rocher. Continuing the Norse mythology theme The Gospel of Loki was published in February 2014. This book tells of the rise and fall of the gods of Asgard from the point of view of Loki the trickster.

In 2011 she contributed a short story, Never Cut A Hawthorn, to Why Willows Weep – an anthology which supports the Woodland Trust.

Recurrent themes

Some of Harris's recurrent themes are: issues of identity; mother/child relationships; the emotional resonance of food; the magic and horror of everyday things; the outsider in the community; faith and superstition; the joy of small pleasures. She has spoken out against entrenched sexism in the literary field, and she has discussed how she weaves a critique of sexist attitudes into her fiction:

Her writing style focuses on the senses, especially those of taste and smell. This may be due to the fact that Harris has a form of synaesthesia, in which she experiences colours as scents. Her novels are often much darker than the film adaptation of Chocolat would lead us to suppose, and characters are often emotionally damaged or morally ambivalent. Father-figures are frequently absent, and mothers are often portrayed as controlling, harsh or even abusive, as in Blueeyedboy and Five Quarters of the Orange. Harris favours a first-person, dual-narrator narrative structure, often revisiting past events to cast light on current developments. This generally makes for complex characterization, and even minor characters are often unusually well-developed. Her books have a very strong sense of place, with settings that play as significant a role as do the characters themselves. The fictional French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, the setting of Chocolat and Peaches for Monsieur le Curé, also features in Blackberry Wine, and the fictional Yorkshire village of Malbry is the setting for both Blueeyedboy and Gentlemen and Players, as well as numerous short stories. Malbry is also the name of Maddy's home in the Rune books, and seems to bear a certain resemblance to Harris' home village of Almondbury.

Awards and honours

Harris's books are now published in over fifty countries and have won a number of UK and international awards, including:

In 2004, she was a judge for the Whitbread Prize (now the Costa), and in 2005, was a judge for the Orange Prize.

In 2013 she was on the judging panel of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books and chaired the Desmond Elliott Prize.

Harris is the holder of honorary doctorates in literature from the University of Huddersfield and the University of Sheffield, and is an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge.

She is a patron of the charities Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and Plan UK, and has travelled to Togo and to the Congo to report on their work. An account of her visit to the Congo was published in Writing on the Edge, a collection of essays by noted literary figures, with photographs by Tom Craig, in 2010. She has also donated short stories for inclusion in anthologies published by a number of charities, notably Piggybank Kids, the Woodland Trust, the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition and Breast Cancer UK.

In 2013 she was awarded an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List.

Harris works from a shed in her back garden and is active on Twitter, where she is known as @joannechocolat, and tumblr, ( http://joannechocolat.tumblr.com/ ) which she uses, along with her website's message board, to answer questions from her fans. She is married, and lives in Yorkshire with her husband Kevin and daughter Anouchka.