Joanne Michèle Sylvie Harris (born 3 July 1964) 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' 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' 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, of an English father and a French mother. Her father, Robert (Bob) Short, taught French and German at Barnsley Girls' High School (later, Hall Balk School for Girls), and her mother was Jeannette Short (née Payen) whom Bob first met on a trip to France, and who also later went on to teach at Barnsley Girls' High School. The family lived above Harris' grandparents' corner sweet shop until Harris was three. There was an outside toilet and no central heating, which horrified Jeannette, who was used to a warmer climate.
Harris' mother did not speak English when she married, and so Harris spoke only French until she started school. This contributed to Harris' early sense of the family being "others" in the community.
Harris' brother was born when Harris was ten: because of the wide age gap between them, she describes this as "being an only child and then being a second mother."
Holidays Throughout her childhood and up until her grandfather's death in 1988, Harris spent the Easter and summer holidays with her French family on the island of Noirmoutier, where her grandfather had a house, a time she calls "wild and idyllic". Harris spent much of her time there exploring the island, alone and undisturbed. These experiences later inspired her 2002 novel, Coastliners, and her 2003 novel, Holy Fools.
Education Harris attended Wakefield Girls' High School and Barnsley Sixth Form College, then went on to study modern and mediaeval languages at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. She met her husband Kevin via graffiti on a school desk when they were both students at Barnsley Sixth Form College.
Early influences Growing up, Harris was influenced by Norse mythology, classic adventure stories, including those of Jules Verne and Rider Haggard, and the work of Shirley Jackson, Victor Hugo, Ray Bradbury, Mervyn Peake and Emily Brontë. Although comics were banned in the home, she enjoyed Dr Who and Blake's 7 as well as Westerns, samurai and horror films. As well as being an avid reader, Harris also loved to write, and began by copying the styles of authors she admired. One of the first examples of this was "a kind of Rider Haggard pastiche" called The City of Gold, when she was about seven.
Career
Teaching 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, which inspired her St. Oswald's books. Later she taught French literature at the University of Sheffield. Harris was one of only a handful of female teachers at Leeds Grammar School, which she describes as "a very male, very old environment". She describes several early clashes with members of staff, including with one senior master who berated her for wearing a trouser suit, saying that a dress or skirt would be more appropriate. The next day Harris wore a red miniskirt and platform boots.
While she was a teacher, Harris 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 allowed Harris to give up teaching to write full-time.
Chocolat Harris describes Chocolat as being very different to her previous books. She was teaching full-time at Leeds Grammar School and had a four-year-old child, but she completed the first draft in four months, stating: "It felt as if I were finding my voice for the first time as an author, and it was exciting and new."
The success of Chocolat came as a surprise to Harris, who had been told by Al Zuckerman, her agent's American counterpart and the author of How to Write the Blockbuster Novel, that her style was "neither fashionable nor commercial" enough to succeed, and that there was no market for "books set in rural France filled with self-indulgent descriptions of food." In an interview with The Yorkshire Post, she states: "I was completely unaware of the genie I was about to release into my ordered little world."
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 went on to sell 35 million copies worldwide. It won the Creative Freedom Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year. In 2012 Chocolat was listed as number 61 in The Guardian's list of the "100 top best-selling books of all time".
In 2000 Chocolat was adapted as a film, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, with a screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs. The film received five Oscar nominations. Since then Harris' books have been published in more than 50 languages.
Chocolat was followed by the novels Blackberry Wine (2000) and Five Quarters of the Orange (2001), 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.
Chocolat sequels
Although she did not originally intend to write a sequel to Chocolat, Harris has written four further novels in the series: The Lollipop Shoes in 2007 (titled The Girl With No Shadow in the US), Peaches for Monsieur le Curé in 2012 (Peaches for Father Francis in the US), and The Strawberry Thief in 2018. In 2025, Orion Books published a prequel to Chocolat, entitled Vianne. Psychological thrillers 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, both set in the fictional town of Malbry, inspired by the Yorkshire village of Almondbury, alongside two more psychological thrillers, Blueeyedboy and Broken Light.
Norse mythology Harris discovered the Norse myths via Dorothy G Horsford’s 1952 retelling for children, Thunder of the Gods. From this, Harris moved on to Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, then went on to teach herself Old Norse in order to read the text in the original. In 2007, Harris published Runemarks, a fantasy novel based on Norse mythology, which reimagines a world after Ragnarök, in which some of the gods have survived. The sequel, Runelight, followed in 2012. In 2014 Harris published a prequel, The Gospel of Loki, a retelling of the myths from the perspective of the Trickster god, and its sequel, The Testament of Loki, in 2017. Until 2024 Harris' fantasy novels and novellas were published under the name Joanne M. Harris to distinguish them from her other work.
Folklore and fairytale 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. In 2024, she published a standalone romantic fantasy novel, The Moonlight Market, described as "a modern fairytale for adults", set in a fictionalised version of London.
She has also published a Doctor Who novella, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller.
Harris's latest novel Sleepers in the Snow was published in October 2026.
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". Her books are often said to evoke scents and tastes.
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.
Style Harris' style is characterized by the frequent use of dual first-person narratives. She has spoken of approaching narrative from a musician's perspective, giving as much emphasis to rhythm and tone as to the novel's plot.She also speaks of the importance of sensory impressions in her work, and of including all the senses. For each of her books she uses a different scent as a writing "trigger", a technique she learnt from Stanislavsky's An Actor Prepares. Of her bilingualism, she says: "French was my first language, but English is the language in which I write. I think this has made me particularly sensitive to certain sounds and cadences, as well as making me more than usually careful about grammar and spelling."
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.
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 2014 she wrote a review of the British Museum's Viking exhibition for The Telegraph. In 2017 she won a Fragrance Foundation Jasmine Award for an article on memory and scent, published in Good Housekeeping.
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.
Scent