Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Joanne Harris was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire on July 3, 1964, her mother is
French, her father English. She was educated at Wakefield Girls' High and
Barnsley Sixth Form College, and then read Modern and Mediaeval Languages at
Saint Catharine's College, Cambridge. After a number of heroic career
failures (rock musician, herbalist, accountant) she succumbed to genetic
pressure and became a French teacher for 12 years at a boys' grammar school in
Leeds, and later taught a French Literature course at Sheffield University.
Her first novel, The Evil Seed, was published in 1989, although she
strongly advises against reading it. Since then she has written Sleep,
Pale Sister (1993); Chocolat (1999); Blackberry Wine (2000);
Five Quarters of the Orange (2001), Coastliners (2002), Holy
Fools (2003), Jigs and Reels (2004), Gentlemen and Players
(2005), The French Market (2005), The Lollipop Shoes (2007), Runemarks (2008), Blueeyedboy (2010), and a cookbook-memoir My French Kitchen (2002). Her books
have been published in 40 countries and have won a number of British and
international awards.
She was awarded an honorary D.Lit (Doctor of Letters) by the University of
Huddersfield in 2003 and also by the University of Sheffield in 2004.
According to her website her hobbies include "mooching, lounging, strutting,
strumming, priest-baiting and quiet subversion of the system, although she also
enjoys obfuscation, sleaze, rebellion, witchcraft, armed robbery, tea and
biscuits. She is not above bribery and would not necessarily refuse an offer
involving exotic travel, champagne or yellow diamonds from Graff. She plays bass
guitar in a band first formed when she was 16, is currently studying Old Norse
and lives with her husband Kevin and her daughter Anouchka, about 15 miles from
the place she was born."
Joanne Harris's website
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Every time I bring out a new book, I’ve noticed the same set of conflicting
reactions from some elements of the Press. One faction inevitably complains
about how very different the present book is from the previous one (as if in
resentment at my having escaped the Sisyphean fate of rolling the same book
uphill throughout eternity), while the opposing faction sets out to prove how
all of my books are exactly the same. Some reviewers are so sure of their
ability to predict where I’m going next that they barely bother to glance at the
book at all, with embarrassing results (check out the journalist who described
Coastliners as “another of Harris’ sweeping historical epics”, or the one who
based her entire review of Jigs & Reels on a single story and wrote how “once
more, food and France play a leading role in this feelgood confection.”)
You may already know that I don’t like expectations. You may also be aware of
how I feel about being pushed, stamped, marked, labelled, briefed, debriefed and
numbered.
That’s why I published Jigs & Reels; to escape the box; to explore uncharted
space; to prove that all roads do not necessarily lead to France, or food, ...
Diana Abu-Jaber is the award-winning author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including Crescent and The Language of Baklava. She lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (more)
If you enjoyed:
Five Quarters of The Orange
Try:
Crescent
by Diana Abu-Jaber
Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, who was born in the Republic of Georgia in 1956. A philologist, critic, essayist, and translator of Japanese, Akunin published his first detective stories in 1998 and ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Gentlemen and Players
Try:
Murder on the Leviathan
by Boris Akunin
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