Joanne Harris


Joanne Michèle Sylvie Harris is a British author, best known for her 1999 novel Chocolat, which was adapted into a film of the same name. Born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, of a French mother and a British father, she was a teacher of French for 15 years and had published three novels during this period before the surprise success of Chocolat enabled her to write full time. Since then she has written over 30 books in a number of genres, including fantasy, psychological thriller, novellas, short stories and non-fiction. Harris's books often feature themes of women's empowerment, folklore, motherhood, community, outsiders and outcasts, and food.
Harris was Chair of the Society of Authors for two terms, and was also elected twice to the board of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society. She is a regular guest on British media, writes regularly for the press and has judged a variety of literary prizes, including the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Prize.
Harris's work has received multiple awards, including two Whitaker Gold Awards and one Whitaker Platinum Award, and is published in over 50 countries.

Early life

Joanne Harris was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, to an English father and a French mother, and lived above her grandparents' corner sweet shop until the age of three. Harris' mother did not speak English when she married, and so Harris spoke only French until she started school. Both her parents taught French at Barnsley Girls' High School. Harris attended Wakefield Girls' High School and Barnsley Sixth Form College. She studied modern and mediaeval languages at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. She met her husband Kevin when they were both students at Barnsley Sixth Form College.
Growing up, Harris was influenced by Norse mythology, classic adventure stories including Jules Verne and Rider Haggard, and the work of Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Mervyn Peake and Emily Brontë.

Literary career

After a year as an accountant, which she later described as "like being trapped in a Terry Gilliam film", Harris trained as a teacher at the University of Sheffield, and for 15 years she taught modern languages, mostly at the independent Leeds Grammar School, and later taught French literature at the University of Sheffield. While she was a teacher, she published the horror/gothic novels The Evil Seed and Sleep, Pale Sister, as well as Chocolat, a literary novel set in a French village, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and which allowed Harris to give up teaching to write full-time.
Chocolat sold over a million copies, making Harris one of only four women to have sold more than a million copies of a single book in the UK, and has gone on to sell 35 million copies worldwide. In 2000 Chocolat was adapted as a film, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, with a screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs.
Harris wrote three further novels in the Chocolat series: The Lollipop Shoes, Peaches for Monsieur le Curé, and The Strawberry Thief, as well as three French cookbooks. In 2025, Orion Books published a prequel to Chocolat, entitled Vianne.
Chocolat was followed by the novels Blackberry Wine and Five Quarters of the Orange, described by The Guardian as "quirky, sensuous books set in the French countryside, in which food dominates events as a token of love, a bargaining chip, a gesture of defiance". They were followed by Coastliners in 2002 and Holy Fools in 2003, both of which are set on the fictional French island of Le Devin.
In 2007, Harris published Runemarks, a fantasy novel based on Norse mythology. The sequels, Runelight, The Gospel of Loki and The Testament of Loki followed between 2011 and 2017. Harris' fantasy novels and novellas were published under the name Joanne M. Harris to distinguish them from her other work.
In 2006, Harris published Gentlemen and Players, a psychological thriller set in the fictional boys' grammar school of St Oswald's, inspired by her time as a teacher. This was followed by two more St Oswald's books, Different Class and A Narrow Door, alongside two more psychological thrillers, Blueeyedboy and Broken Light, all set in the fictional town of Malbry, inspired by the Yorkshire village of Almondbury.
Harris has also published three novellas, A Pocketful of Crows, The Blue Salt Road, and Orfeia, loosely based on Child Ballads and illustrated by Bonnie Helen Hawkins, as well as two collections of short stories and numerous contributions to various charitable anthologies. In 2021, she published Honeycomb, a collection of original fairytales forming a mosaic novel, illustrated by Charles Vess. She has also published a Doctor Who novella, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller.
Harris's novel Sleepers in the Snow is scheduled to be published in October 2026.
Harris' books have now been published in more than 50 languages.

Journalism

Harris writes regularly for the press, and has written multiple travel pieces for The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent and The Times, as well as articles on more literary themes. In 2017 she won a Fragrance Foundation Jasmine Award for an article on memory and scent, published in Good Housekeeping.

Themes

Repeated themes in Harris' books include: food as a means of understanding character; the dynamic between feasting and fasting; motherhood and the patriarchy; tensions within communities; outsiders and outcasts; religious intolerance and "the magic of everyday things".
Many of Harris' books are about women who challenge the status quo and the way in which women are perceived in society. Harris also regularly uses folklore and myth in her novels, giving a modern, original spin to traditional stories.

Reception

The books have been praised for their multi-layered storytelling, use of culinary metaphors and arresting plot twists. The Guardian describes Harris' books as "astringent, highly original and often subtly fantastic mainstream novels". The Irish Times says: "The Chocolat novels are poignant literary explorations of universal themes of pleasure and denial, the dangers of dogma, xenophobia and racism and the enduring power of love and understanding to eradicate the traumas of the past," with a Locus review calling Harris "exceedingly gifted at producing vivid imagery". Critics have remarked on her skill at "foreshadowing impending doom" and "unerring eye for school life". Some reviewers have questioned the plausibility of some of the plot twists, while acknowledging the compulsive nature of the read.

Other activities

Music

Harris has been involved in a number of musical projects, including collaborating with Lucie Treacher and the Tête à Tête Opera Festival to create two mini-operas, performing with the Storytime Band and building a stage show based on her work, and co-writing and developing an original stage musical, Stunners, with Howard Goodall. In 2018 she and the Storytime Band were guests on the Christmas special of The Verb.

Prize Judging

She has judged the Orange (Women's) Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Primadonna Prize, the Comedy Women in Print Award and the Winton Prize for Science Books. In 2024 Harris chaired the new Entente Littéraire Prize for Young Adult novels, a joint initiative of Queen Camilla and Brigitte Macron, sponsored by the Royal Society of Literature.

Media

Harris is a regular guest on radio and TV, appearing on Woman's Hour, A Good Read, Front Row, The Verb, The Wright Stuff, Question Time, Loose Ends,With Great Pleasure, Saturday Live, ''In Tune, and the Today programme. In 2008 she appeared in the TV miniseries The Worlds of Fantasy. She appeared in two episodes of the TV series Inside Out: one in 2009 investigating the "real story" behind the death of Charlotte Bronte, the other 2010 on the topic of faith schools. In 2011 she featured in the episode The Villain of the four-part TV series Faulks On Fiction alongside Sebastian Faulks. In 2016 she appeared in one episode of Christmas University Challenge. In 2021, Harris was a guest on BBC's Desert Island Discs, where her chosen book was the collected works of Victor Hugo, her luxury was her own shed, and the record she "would save from the waves" was Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now". In 2025, she was interviewed about her career by Jonathan Agnew for BBC Radio 5 Test Match Special''.
She is also active on social media, and in 2016 was nominated for a Shorty Award for her contributions.

Charity work

Harris is a patron of the charities Médecins Sans Frontières, to which she donated the proceeds of her cookery books, and Plan UK. In 2012 she travelled to several villages in Togo as part of Plan UK's Because I Am a Girl project, later writing the short story Road Song based on her experiences. In 2009 she travelled to the Congo to report on MSF's work there, spending three weeks with aid workers in the danger zones to write an article on MSF's sleeping sickness programme. Her 2013 short story River Song was based on an encounter during this time. An account of the trip was published in Writing On The Edge: Great Contemporary Writers on the Front Line of Crisis, a collection of essays by writers including Martin Amis, Tracy Chevalier and A.A. Gill, with photographs by Tom Craig.

Activism

Harris was chair of the management committee of the Society of Authors for two terms from 2020 to 2024, being unanimously re-elected to the position in March 2022. She assisted in several SOA campaigns, including calling for more investment in libraries and the arts, calling for translators to have their names on the cover of books, and raising awareness on author pay and conditions. In 2022 she appeared on the Bookseller's list of the 150 most influential people in publishing.
She has also campaigned against library closures, has called for literary festivals to pay contributors, has spoken out in favour of trigger warnings in books, has spoken out against sexism in publishing, and the gendering of children's books. In 2015, Harris launched a protest against the Clean Reader app, which had been designed to replace profanities in books with "clean" alternatives, calling it "censorship, not by the state, but by a religious minority". This campaign, which was supported by many other authors, including Chuck Wendig, Charles Stross and Margaret Atwood, led to the speedy removal of the app. In 2022 a members' vote was raised calling for Harris to stand down as chair of the SOA, in relation to the society's stance on protecting free speech. The motion was defeated, with 81% voting against.
Harris became a member of the Board of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society in 2019, and was re-elected in 2021. During this time she campaigned against the unregulated use of generative AI, called for "an industry-wide standard to be introduced" for festivals to pay their contributors, campaigned for a wider awareness of copyright issues and the importance of fair pay for authors. She stepped down from the post in 2024, having served two terms.
In 2025 she signed an open letter alongside Richard Osman, Kate Mosse and Val McDermid, calling for the UK government "to hold Meta accountable over its use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence."

Honours and awards

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.
Harris was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2013 Birthday Honours and Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to literature.
In 2022, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In 2022, Harris was also named PinkNews "Ally of the Year".

Notable literary awards

Personal life

Harris lives in Yorkshire with her husband Kevin, and has a son. She works from a shed in her garden. Harris was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020, and discussed the diagnosis and her ongoing treatment on social media and at the Hay Festival. In 2023, she was declared cancer-free, and wrote in The Guardian that the experience had made her reassess her priorities and had given her back her voice.
She has stated that she has a form of synaesthesia "in which colours in bright light trigger scents". She also suffers from seasonal affective disorder in winter, and has dyscalculia, an inability to process numbers.

Publications

Chocolat series

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''Malbry series''

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Rune series

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  • as Joanne M. Harris
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Novellas

  • . Doctor Who novella.
  • a folklore-inspired novella, illustrated by Bonnie Hawkins.
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  • . Illustrated by Bonnie Hawkins.

On writing

  • a self-help book for writers. Illustrated by Moose Alain.

Fantasy and science fiction

  • . Illustrated by Charles Vess.
  • . Omnibus edition of three folklore-inspired novellas, plus additional stories. Illustrated by Bonnie Helen Hawkins.

Stories in anthologies

  • A collection of stories in aid of Piggybank Kids.Edited by J.K. Rowling.
  • A collection of stories in aid of Breast Cancer UK.
  • A collection of stories in aid of Piggybank Kids.
  • A collection of stories in aid of Piggybank Kids.
  • A collection in aid of Piggybank Kids.
  • A collection of erotic stories by well-known female writers.
  • Charity anthology in aid of Plan UK.
  • A collection of fantasy tales, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio.
  • A collection of eyewitness accounts by well-known authors of extreme conditions and war-torn locations. In aid of MSF.
  • Charity anthology in aid of the Woodland Trust.
  • Charity anthology in aid of the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition.
  • Edited by David Miller.
  • A collection of Doctor Who stories by various authors, including the Harris novella The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller.
  • An anthology of stories on the subject of curses, edited by Marie O'Regan and Paul Kane.

Audiobooks narrated by Joanne Harris