Joanne Harris (born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, in 1964) is a British novelist of partly French descent, best known for Chocolat (1999). She writes in English, and her work, which spans psychological thrillers, fantasy and short fiction, has reached readers in many countries.
The daughter of an English father and a French mother, she learned to speak French before English. She studied modern and medieval languages at Cambridge and spent fifteen years teaching languages at an independent school in Leeds while writing on the side. Her first novels, The Evil Seed (1989) and Sleep, Pale Sister (1993), were gothic horror stories that did not bring her wide fame.
Success came with Chocolat (1999), the story of a single mother who opens a chocolate shop in a conservative French village. The novel became a bestseller and was adapted into a film in 2000. Afterwards Harris moved between psychological fiction, such as Gentlemen and Players (2006), and fantasy drawn from Norse mythology, which produced Runemarks (2007) and The Gospel of Loki (2014), told from the viewpoint of the trickster god. Her recurring themes include identity, motherhood, community and the outsiders within it, faith and superstition, and the emotional weight of food. Her prose is rich in the senses, especially taste and smell, and she has spoken out against the sexism that persists in publishing.
Her legacy lies in bringing folklore and fairy tale to a mass readership without giving up careful writing. She was appointed MBE in 2013.
Key works
- Chocolat (1999): a single mother and her daughter arrive in a French village and transform its inhabitants with a chocolate shop.
- Five Quarters of the Orange (2001): a woman returns to her French childhood home and confronts family secrets, told through cooking and memory.
- Gentlemen & Players (2006): a psychological thriller set in an English boys' grammar school, drawing on the author's years as a teacher.
- Runemarks (2007): a Norse-inspired fantasy set in a world after Ragnarök, where some of the gods have survived.
- The Gospel of Loki (2014): a retelling of the Norse myths from the perspective of Loki.
Curiosities
Synaesthesia
Harris has said that she experiences colours as smells. This trait has been linked to the importance of taste and smell in her writing.
An early rejection
Harris recalls being told by a American agent that her style was not commercial enough and that rural France and food-heavy novels had no market. Chocolat went on to sell over a million copies in the UK alone.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.