Joanne Harris Meet the Author


Joanne Harris

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For her latest novel, Different Class, Joanne Harris

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is back in school, St Oswald's Grammar School,

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And although she says that she thinks of it as comic,

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From one of our most prolific and well read authors,

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Chocolat was of course an international bestseller

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The classrooms and corridors are the setting for a story

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sometimes hate, deception and some violence,

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and an exploration of some of the most troubling relationships

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between teachers and pupils, and the havoc that they

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Joanne, despite what happens to some of the pupils

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and teachers in this story, it strikes me that

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and they're wonderful observations of community.

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The observation here is, as I said at the beginning, pretty dark.

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It's funny, it's touching, but it goes to some very dark places,

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both in terms of the staff and their charges.

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I've found that schools are a perpetual stage for tragedy,

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So many things can happen, it's such an unpredictable environment.

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And that unpredictability isn't just because of the setting,

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it's because of the age of those involved.

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We're talking about adolescents, people going through

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all kinds of crises, some imagined, some real.

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And relationships with teachers, which are inevitably

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It's a very intense stage, adolescence.

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things for the first time and they are so powerful that they

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I found it a very interesting thing to be part of,

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but it's daunting as well, because later I realised

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that as a teacher, you can influence somebody's life

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and if they remember something as unfair,

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they can resent it in a way an adult would not.

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I won't say what they are, but I think it's safe to say you're

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become much more familiar to us - allegations of sexual impropriety

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and terrible emotional trauma between staff and pupils -

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did you know that's what you were getting into when you started?

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What happened was that I started off with the germ of an idea

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Operation Yewtree started to unfold, and I found that there

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was an uncomfortable crossover between what I was writing

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about and what was happening in the world, and it became much

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darker and more topical than I thought it would.

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You touch on the whole question in this book

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rather hysterical ones, leading to, in some cases, a witchhunt

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atmosphere, or territory where there are false accusations

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and great damage done as a consequence.

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It's something that clearly fascinates you,

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the unfairness that's lurking under the surface.

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And also the past and how the past affects the present,

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and how memory is not inherently a reliable tool, particularly

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when dealing with experiences of trauma, how memory can be

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affected by all kinds of things that are happening in the present day,

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and how memory can therefore sometimes be both

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The principal character, Straightly, has been a teacher

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so this has happened to him again and again.

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There's that interesting sense of having seen generations

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of pupils coming through, in his case, to learn

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We're not same person, but I might have grown

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at the school where I taught for long enough.

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He's aware that he is affecting young lives, and he has

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I also like the fact that he is a bit of a subversive.

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He has various prejudices he's

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He's a bit bad with technology, he likes the odd sneaky fag

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One of the interesting things about the way

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you construct the narrative here is that

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you have an older man talking, but you have youngsters as well,

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so they're inhabiting completely different milieu

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although they're in the same place, in the school.

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That's right, but I think I had the benefit of being in that

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environment for long enough to pick up a lot of voices, to remember

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the way teenage boys talked, the way older members of staff

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talked, and so I've borrowed from colleagues, from pupils

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who are now ex-pupils and who watch the whole process with joy

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You're a great Twitter user, I gather.

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Do you find old pupils coming on and saying,

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Many boys come back and say they read this.

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Very often, they turn up to readings, and of

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I'm writing about them, which isn't quite true, but there

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And although it's a dark story, you're clearly having fun.

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You're an immensely successful author, very widely read.

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Are you irritated when people say "You're the Chocolat woman"?

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I know you're not irritated by its success, but does it

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I'm very grateful for the response to Chocolat and the fact

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I love it, too, and I'm still writing about those characters.

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What I find irksome, if anything, is the assumption that

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Most of my readers don't make that assumption,

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go in any kind of direction and have done, and I'm lucky in that sense.

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You take the authorial responsibility

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Recently, you talked about not going to one

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because they were expecting all kinds of things,

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exclusive contracts and a puny fee, and you said, hang on,

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authors deserve to be treated in a better way.

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It's not just about me wanting money or special treatment.

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I would like people to see writing as a job, a profession,

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This is particularly important for young authors

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in getting to festivals because of what it costs.

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They don't make much money writing, contrary to public opinion.

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The average salary of a professional author is ?11,000 a year,

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Not many of us get to write for a living and make

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And you're an author who conforms, I think, to one of

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Do you disappear and enter a different world when you're there?

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Shed World is a specific space, and I think it's

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for an author to have a work space, particularly someone like me,

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It's difficult to manage your time and get into the psychological

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headspace of writing, so I think it's important to create

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a place where you work and nothing else happens,

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When I started off, I had no desk, so I had two objects I would put

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in front of my laptop when I wanted to write, and that created my work

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Sometimes, I'm working on two at once, almost always, in fact.

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I have books that I write on sunny days and ones that

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I write on dark days, of which Different Class was one.

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It is, although there are glimpses of sunshine as well.

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Some parts of the UK had a decent day with some winter sunshine and

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you had to go to the hills of

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