Sweet success for author Joanne Harris

She may have grown up above a Barnsley sweet shop, but Joanne Harris hardly ever ate sweets as a child.

“I have more of a savoury tooth – give me cheese and chillies any day,” admits the internationally acclaimed author who now lives near Huddersfield with her husband Kevin and daughter, 20-year-old Anouchka.

This revelation may come as a surprise to the many fans of her smash hit novel Chocolat which is celebrating 15 years since it was first published and was made into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche.

That’s not to say that Harris, who turns 50 this summer, doesn’t like chocolate. In fact she has just published a cookery book, her third with food writer Fran Warde, to celebrate 15 years since the publication of Chocolat.

“It doesn’t feel like 15 years,” says Harris, who was working as a French teacher at Leeds Grammar School when she published her third novel.

Although chocolate may not be her favourite food it is clear from the introduction to the Little Book of Chocolat that she is fascinated with the stuff. Not just the taste of it, but its history and mystery and its power to seduce.

“I am not a chocoholic; although I do enjoy chocolate occasionally, it’s not among the foods I could never live without,” she confesses. “And yet as I wrote my story (Chocolat) I found myself increasingly fascinated by the history and folklore of chocolate: its capacity to transform and evolve; and of course, the emotional resonance that chocolate holds for so many of us, something that transcends mere taste and becomes a spiritual journey.”

It was important to Harris that she include some of this history and folklore in her book alongside the mouth watering recipes inspired by the characters in the Chocolat trilogy.

Joanne Harris MBE was born in Barnsley to a Yorkshire father and a French mother. Her parents met while her father was studying in France to become a French teacher.

“I was born in a sweet shop. A corner sweet shop in Barnsley, to be precise; a place as far removed from Vianne Rocher’s (Chocolat’s heroine) elegant little chocolaterie as it was possible to be,” says Harris.

“The shop, which belonged to my grandparents, sold mostly newspapers and sweets, the sweets in glass jars in the window, kaleidoscopic and fascinating. I very rarely ate any, chocolate too was a rare treat – and at that time generally not of a wonderful quality.”

It was on her trips to France to visit her French family that Harris got her first tastes of ‘real’ chocolate shops.

The Easter holidays were particularly memorable.

“Of course, we had Easter eggs in England. But ours were dull in comparison – gritty, fatty chocolate in foil and cardboard, while the French ones were works of art, wrapped in transparent cellophane.”

She was also fascinated by the stories that accompanied these delights. The Easter pagan rituals which seemed to sit quite happily with the Catholic country.

And this is where she says Chocolat was born, “between the beautiful chocolate shops of western France and the close little Yorkshire community that shaped so much of my childhood; a story not just of chocolate but of people living together in a place formed by traditions; of insiders and outsiders; of folklore and religion; of tolerance and cruelty; feasting, fasting and family.”

She says most of her novels, there have been 14 in total sold in more than 50 countries, have their roots in people, places and incidents she has experienced herself.

Having always been a voracious reader, a young Joanne Harris also loved to write.

“I would write all sorts of things – at first copying the writer I liked until I found my own style.”

She studied modern and mediaeval languages at Cambridge and was a teacher for 15 years, teaching French at Leeds Grammar School.

It was while teaching that she published three novels, but it was the third, Chocolat, which was to change her life.

“I was completely unaware of the genie I was about to realise into my ordered little world.”

She quite soon had to give up teaching as she was much in demand to promote Chocolat and the subsequent film which saw her rubbing shoulders with the film’s stars, something she seems to have taken in her stride.

One of the recipes in The Little Book of Chocolat is called Brioche Juliette.

“Juliette Brioche was the nickname given to Juliette Binoche by my six-year-old daughter when Juliette first came to stay at our house before filming Chocolat,” recalls Harris.

“She had a very lively sense of humour and I think she would enjoy the idea of having a chocolate cake named after her.”

Although it is for Chocolat that many people will associate her, Harris says she doesn’t believe she has become pigeonholed by her third novel.

“All of my books have been best-sellers. People who come to my readings don’t expect to hear extract from Chocolat.”

As well as Little Book of Chocolat, Harris is promoting her latest novel The Gospel of Loki, a fantasy novel about the rise and fall of Norse gods. She still writes from the shed in her garden and when she can plays bass in the band first formed when she was 16. She is passionate about getting children reading and has backed The Yorkshire Post’s Turning the Page campaign.

“It doesn’t matter what children are reading, so long as they enjoy it,” she says.