Joanne Harris in conversation with Nicola Sturgeon featuring Sleepers in the Snow & more.

Joanne Harris joins Nicola Sturgeon for a conversation about her writing and the stories behind her work, including Sleepers in the Snow.

The discussion will explore Harris’s varied career across novels, short stories, screenwriting and cookbooks, and the ideas that have carried her work to readers around the world.

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 over twenty 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.

Make the most of your visit…