“Blackberry Wine” won the Salon du Livre Gourmand (France) winning both the International and Foreign categories. Her novel “Chocolat” was adapted in the year 2000 into a movie that starred Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. She uses the pen name Joanne M Harris to publish her “Loki” series and “Runemarks” series. Harris’ writing style focuses on the senses, mainly smell and taste. Some themes explored in her works involve mother/child relationships, identity issues, magic and horror found in everyday things, emotional resonance of food, faith and superstition, outsider in a community, and the joy found in small pleasures.
It was with her second novel that showed her style developing going from horror pastiche to a literary ghost story.
“The Evil Seed” is her debut novel and was published in the year 1989 with limited success. She had three books published before retiring from her teaching job to focus on her writing work. It was during this time that she worked on quite a few book projects. Harris also spent some time teaching at Sheffield University, lecturing on different aspects of French film and literature. Harris spent an unsuccessful year as an accountant, which she felt was like spending a year inside a Terry Gilliam film, and after training at Sheffield University as a teacher, and taught modern languages, mostly at Leeds Grammar School, which is a boys’ independent school located in Yorkshire. Harris started writing at a young age, being strongly influenced by Charles Perrault’s work and Grimms’ Fairy Tales, as well as Norse mythology and local folklore. She is Anglo-French, and she writes diverse things, covering aspects of suspense, magic realism, mythology, historical fiction, and fantasy.
Both sides of her family had turbulent histories and a tradition for the women to be strong, storytelling, cookery, folklore, and kitchen gardening. The first language she learned was French, causing a divide between her English family, as no one spoke French, and the French family, where there were no English speakers.
Author Joanne Harris was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire in the year 1964 to her French mom and English dad, and her parents were teachers of modern literature and languages at a grammar school.
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