At 4pm on Saturday, 8th June 2024, award-winning author Joanne Harris (Chocolat, The Moonlight Market, The Testament of Loki) will be making a personal appearance as part of Fairford Festival, being interviewed and taking audience questions and then signing and selling her books. This is a ticketed event in a separate tent within the Festival. (Tickets cost £10 plus booking fee. One child under 16 free with a paying adult.)
Joanne Harris (OBE, FRSL) was born in Barnsley in 1964, of a French mother and an English father. She studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages at Cambridge and was a teacher for fifteen years, during which time she published three novels, including Chocolat (1999), which was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche.
Since then, she has written 20 more novels, plus novellas, short stories, game scripts, screenplays, a stage musical (with Howard Goodall) and three cookbooks. Her books are now published in over 50 countries and have won a number of British and international awards. She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, has honorary doctorates in literature from the universities of Sheffield and Huddersfield, and has been a judge for the Whitbread (Costa) Prize, the Women’s Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Prima Donna Prize and the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science, as well as for the Fragrance Foundation awards for perfume and perfume journalism (for which she also received an award in 2017). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
She is a passionate advocate for authors’ rights, and was the Chair of the Society of Authors (SoA) for four years. She is currently a member of the Board of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS).
