TEDxSalford

Speaker Announcement – Joanne Harris

Joanne Harris, MBE, has written 17 books and counting – the most well-known of which being Chocolat, which was nominated for the prestigious Whitbread award. A year later it was made into a film of the same name, starring Dame Judi Dench, Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, and was equally well received;  the proof in the pudding (pun intended) being its nominations for 5 Oscars, a Bafta, an Emmy and a Grammy.

If you’ve read any of the ‘Chocolat’ series, you’ll no doubt spot Joanne’s own history trickling through into her plots.  Her father met her mother while he was on a French exchange in Brittany. Like a character from her books, her great-grandmother was known locally in her French village as ‘a witch and a healer who once disguised herself as an apparition of the Virgin Mary to shock the local priest.’  Her father brought her mother back to Barnsley, to live in his parents’ sweetshop, where Joanne was born.

Chocolat was the first of the Series, continuing with Lollipop Shoes, then this year, Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé.  Besides her popular Chocolat series, she’s written many other novels spanning a range of genres, cookbooks and short stories.  She published her first book, The Evil Seed, in 1989 – 10 years before Chocolat in 1999.

Joanne proves herself in every genre she turns her hand to;  horror, fantasy and psychological thriller. ‘Gastromance’ is the  genre which had to be invented to describe the unique style of Chocolat, Five Quarters of an Orange and Blackberry Wine; her artful descriptions of rich flavours wrap themselves around characters to awaken primordial passions, long forgotten in the quiet humdrum of the fictional French Town of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes.   Food and wine brings people together or drives  them apart like magic.

Joanne had the most unlikely career path to becoming a best-selling writer whose work has been translated into more than 50 languages.  She worked unhappily as an accountant, which she describes as ‘12 months in Hell’ and confesses to pulling as many sickies as she could until, as the daughter of a Headmistress and Head of Foreign Languages, she followed her parents into teaching, which she loved enough to quit pulling sickies and teach for the next 15 years.

She jumped in at the deep end, teaching Modern Foreign Languages at a mixed comprehensive (no walk in the park, as anyone who’s been detained against their will in a mixed comp will know) before spending the next 12 years at Leeds Grammar School.  While she was teaching, she published her first three books, The Evil Seed, Sleep Pale Sister and Chocolat. After she left to write full time, she revisited her teaching days in Gentlemen & Players, set in an old grammar school where insidious new technology subjects puncture the traditions at the heart of the school, spiteful bullies reign like vengeful gods, and vicious staff politics escalates into chaos.

“I have fond memories of LGS; the eccentric layout; the proliferating vermin (my room in the Bell Tower was plagued by mice and haunted by pigeons); the weird traditions; the boys and staff. Women teachers were few; political correctness was at a minimum; junior staff incurred the wrath of seniors if they happened to sit in the wrong chair; academic gowns were worn for Assembly and tours of duty; Latin was compulsory. I loved it; I’d gone from Grange Hill to Gormenghast in a single move, and I was all set to stay there forever.”

In 2010 she wrote Blueeyedboy, a dark thriller about a boy with synaesthesia –  a condition in which one sense is perceived at the same time with other senses.  The ‘Blueeyedboy’ can smell colours, but more disabling is that he feels physical pain when he sees someone being hurt.  There are many documented cases of famous musicians, writers, poets and artists having synaesthesia. To name a few in no particular order; David Hockney, Tori Amos, Stevie Wonder, Franz Liszt, Leonard Bernstein  and Vladimir Nabokov. Daniel Tammet, of the documentary, The Boy with the Incredible Brain, explains his experience of synaesthesia in his 2011 TED talk, Different Ways of Knowing.

In Joanne’s case she has a cross-sensory experience of colours, tastes and scents, so for her, the colour red smells of chocolate. In an interview with The Metro she says “Colours trigger tastes or smells for me. There’s a fashionable shade of dirty yellow at the moment which smells very unpleasant to me. I can’t go into certain shops if there’s too much of that colour.” From having  all of her novels, (yes, every  one)  I would guess that her synaesthesia has gone some way to blending the sumptuous descriptions in her writing that produce such a sensual effect, her gastromancy, that it’s almost impossible not to deeply crave the menu in the book. I’m never sure which I want more – real chocolate, or to keep reading.

We’re very happy to announce that Joanne Harris will be joining us to speak at TEDxSalford, on November 10th 2013 at the Lowry Theatre, Salford Quays, Greater Manchester. Tickets are available here.