Joanne Harris on the Society of Authors row: ‘The idea of free speech has been misused’
In 2020 the novelist Joanne Harris was diagnosed with breast cancer. Britain was in lockdown and it was a frightening time. “So I did what I often do when I can’t process something and I wrote a novel about it,” she says. “A lot of stuff that was happening to me found its way into this scary story about a woman who is Alone and undergoing physical changes that may or may not be supernatural.”
She pitched the novel, Broken Light, which was published last spring, to her agent as ‘menopause Carrie’. “She baulked a bit. But I wanted to write about the experience of becoming invisible, in a world where visibility, we are told, is your greatest asset. It was quite an angry story in the end.”
I have met the author, still indelibly associated with her delectable 1999 best-seller Chocolat, at King’s Cross, where she stays whenever she commutes from her Yorkshire village home. She is thankfully now cancer free, the only remaining trace a nifty buzz cut about which she is rather self-conscious (when I ask her if having cancer has made her bolder, she initially thinks I’ve said ‘balder’, then erupts into laughter when she realises her mistake). But cancer has made her feel more armoured.
“It triggered my ‘if I can survive this, I can survive anything’ reflex. I don’t obsess about negative things as much as I used to – setbacks, rejections, people being mean on social media. Instead, I think, ‘I’m going to ignore this now.’”
Which brings us neatly to Harris’s recent period as chairwoman of the Society of Authors. Her four-year tenure at this venerable industry trade union, which ended in January this year, was marred by two almighty rows, both concerning an author’s right to free speech and both playing out in the unedifying sphere of Twitter. First, the then-president Philip Pullman accused the Society of not defending the author Kate Clanchy, who had been pilloried online after she was accused of racism and ableism in her 2019 Orwell Prize-winning memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. He resigned in March 2022. Meanwhile, Harris and Clanchy became embroiled in a private row over the affair on Twitter.
Then, Harris found herself making headline news when she posted on Twitter a jokey poll about author death threats 24 hours after Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed several times on stage in New York in August 2022. Not long previously, J K Rowling had tweeted her horror at the attempted murder and received the immediate response from a troll “Don’t worry, you are next”. Harris’s tweet was widely taken to be dismissive of Rowling’s own death threat, although Harris deleted it 20 minutes later and apologised. A no-confidence motion in her leadership took place in November, which Harris comfortably survived with the support of 81 per cent of members. She was awarded an OBE for her services to literature only a few months later.
So, what on earth went wrong? How did an organisation dedicated to protecting the rights of authors find itself so loudly accused of doing precisely the opposite? And how did an author best known for charming novels about magic, food and folklore find herself at the centre? Harris is tight-lipped. “I’m not going to talk about this. I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to comment on issues that might involve other people,” she says. More broadly, then, does she think the society ought to have done more to protect Clanchy, who, despite apologising and rewriting her memoir, was dropped by her publisher?
“We’ve got a lot of members, they have a lot of different opinions, the society has always made it clear it can’t represent them all. And so therefore it chooses not to pitch in and represent any of them,” she says. Even when it comes to free speech?
“The idea of free speech has been misused and misapplied to situations where, to me, the situation wasn’t always about free speech. Sometimes it was about criticism of one sort or another, which in itself is free speech. Sometimes it can be very awkward walking that line and I’m sure the SOA found that.”
Does she regret the tweet she sent in the wake of the assassination attempt on Rushdie? “It wasn’t even about Rushdie. It was part of a previous, ongoing, initially light-hearted conversation on Twitter that I had been having with [the author and blogger] Chuck Wendig about the number of authors who get death threats. Chuck was talking [in a semi-serious fashion] about his latest death threat in which someone had said, ‘I hope you get f---ed to death by a shark’. So the Twitter poll came out of that. Most authors tend not to talk about death threats, or laugh them off as a joke – but authors can be vulnerable.”
Harris knew Rushdie had been stabbed, but “the Rushdie attack, which was deeply upsetting, was happening somewhere else and I didn’t connect the two until someone pointed it out”.
What about defending Rowling against the death threat she received? “I’m not going to talk about JK Rowling,” she says.
Harris is a mix of defiance and sensitivity. She says she too has been the victim of death threats – some of them in the wake of the spat with Rowling. She agrees that the trans debate in particular (Harris has a trans son) tends to be framed in language that is divisive rather than constructive. “There is a lot of aggression, misinformation and fear which feeds into the real world. I don’t know how to fix that.” Her own gesture of support is to use “she/they” pronouns.
“I do that to indicate that pronouns are just pronouns. I am not uncomfortable if people use ‘they’ pronouns around me or about someone else. It’s not something that impacts my life.”
Still, she is highly active on Twitter. Surely Twitter, with its unerring ability to flatten nuance and weaponise opinion is itself part of the problem? “I no longer use it as much as I did. Twitter can be a great force for good but also a great force for misinformation, lies, damage.” None the less she has no regrets about anything that was said or done while she was chairwoman. “I don’t think that is a question I can answer. I don’t really think in that way.”
Harris, 59, remains a prolific novelist. She has a new novel, The Moonlight Market, a love story set in a mysterious alternative London, out this summer, while a prequel to Chocolat, Vianne, set six years earlier, about how the Chocolat heroine learns to cook, is coming in March 2025. She writes in a shed in the garden of the house she shares with her husband, who helps manage her schedule, and whom she met when she was 16.
She has a form of synesthesia which means she experiences certain colours as smells (“a certain shade of blue smells like coconut”) and you can feel the impact of this on her writing, which is often sensual and plays a lot on the idea of perception. “The idea that we inhabit a reality of our own sensory making is to me quite interesting,” she says.
That she became a successful novelist in the first place is arguably thanks to a disenchanted agent in America. “Right at the start of my career my British agent sent him a manuscript of mine. A letter came back telling me, ‘You can write but this book is unsaleable. It’s terribly parochial, it’s full of old people and food and it’s got no sex in it.’ So I sat down and wrote Chocolat just to annoy him. And it did ok,” She laughs. “My mother says I am often motivated to do things to annoy other people.”
Joanne Harris is at the Oxford Literary Festival on Mar 23. oxfordliteraryfestival.org. The paperback edition of Broken Light is published Mar 28