Early Life
Her writing began at an early age and was strongly influenced by Grimms' Fairy Tales and the tales of Charles Perrault, as well as local folklore and Norse mythology.
She was educated at Wakefield Girls High School, Barnsley Sixth Form College, and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where she studied Modern and Medieval Languages. After 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 Sheffield University, and for fifteen years she taught modern languages, mostly at Leeds Grammar School, a boys' independent school in Yorkshire. She also taught at Sheffield University, lecturing on aspects of French literature and film. During this period, she worked on a number of book projects, three of which (The Evil Seed, Sleep, Pale Sister and Chocolat) were published before she left teaching to become a full-time writer.
Read more about this topic: Joanne Harris
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)