The film rights were sold to David Brown and developed by Miramax Pictures.
The book won the Creative Freedom Award in 1999 and was shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award. In 1999 her third novel, Chocolat, a darkly magical modern folk-tale, thematically based on food and set in the Gers region of France, reached number 1 in the Sunday Times ' bestseller list. A second novel, Sleep, Pale Sister, shows the way in which her style developed from horror-pastiche to literary ghost story. Her first novel, The Evil Seed, was published in 1989, with only limited success. During this period she worked on a number of book projects The Evil Seed, Sleep, Pale Sister and Chocolat were published while she was still teaching. She also taught at Sheffield University, lecturing on aspects of French literature and film. She was educated at Wakefield Girls' High School, Barnsley Sixth Form College, and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where she studied modern and mediaeval languages.Īfter a single, unsuccessful year as an accountant, which she describes as "like being trapped in a Terry Gilliam movie", she trained as a teacher at the University of Sheffield, and for 15 years she taught modern languages, mostly at Leeds Grammar School, a boys' independent school in Yorkshire. She was strongly influenced by Grimms' Fairy Tales and Charles Perrault's work, as well as local folklore and Norse mythology. Both families had turbulent histories and a tradition of strong women, kitchen gardening, storytelling, folklore and cookery. Her first language was French, which caused divisions between her English family, where nobody spoke French, and her French family, where nobody spoke English. Both of her parents were teachers of modern languages and literature at a local grammar school. Harris was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, to an English father and a French mother. Joanne Michèle Sylvie Harris OBE FRSL (born 3 July 1964) is an English-French author, best known for her novel Chocolat (1999), which was adapted the following year for the film Chocolat.
Recorded December 2011 from the BBC Radio 4 programme Woman's Hour
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