Joanne Harris Meet the Author

For her latest novel, Different Class, Joanne Harris

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

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

From one of our most prolific and well read authors,

Chocolat was of course an international bestseller

The classrooms and corridors are the setting for a story

sometimes hate, deception and some violence,

and an exploration of some of the most troubling relationships

between teachers and pupils, and the havoc that they

Joanne, despite what happens to some of the pupils

and teachers in this story, it strikes me that

and they're wonderful observations of community.

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

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

both in terms of the staff and their charges.

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

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

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

it's because of the age of those involved.

We're talking about adolescents, people going through

all kinds of crises, some imagined, some real.

And relationships with teachers, which are inevitably

It's a very intense stage, adolescence.

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

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

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

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

and if they remember something as unfair,

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

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

become much more familiar to us - allegations of sexual impropriety

and terrible emotional trauma between staff and pupils -

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

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

Operation Yewtree started to unfold, and I found that there

was an uncomfortable crossover between what I was writing

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

darker and more topical than I thought it would.

You touch on the whole question in this book

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

atmosphere, or territory where there are false accusations

and great damage done as a consequence.

It's something that clearly fascinates you,

the unfairness that's lurking under the surface.

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

and how memory is not inherently a reliable tool, particularly

when dealing with experiences of trauma, how memory can be

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

and how memory can therefore sometimes be both

The principal character, Straightly, has been a teacher

so this has happened to him again and again.

There's that interesting sense of having seen generations

of pupils coming through, in his case, to learn

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

at the school where I taught for long enough.

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

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

He has various prejudices he's

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

One of the interesting things about the way

you construct the narrative here is that

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

so they're inhabiting completely different milieu

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

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

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

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

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

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

You're a great Twitter user, I gather.

Do you find old pupils coming on and saying,

Many boys come back and say they read this.

Very often, they turn up to readings, and of

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most of my readers don't make that assumption,

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

You take the authorial responsibility

Recently, you talked about not going to one

because they were expecting all kinds of things,

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

authors deserve to be treated in a better way.

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

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

This is particularly important for young authors

in getting to festivals because of what it costs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a place where you work and nothing else happens,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

you had to go to the hills of