The Little Book of Chocolat

Joanne Harris is the internationally renowned and award-winning author of over twenty novels. Her Whitbread-shortlisted novel Chocolat was adapted to the screen, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. She is the author of several other bestsellers, including The Lollipop Shoes, Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé and The Strawberry Thief. She has also written acclaimed novels in such diverse genres as fantasy based on Norse myth (Runemarks, Runelight, The Gospel of Loki), and the Malbry cycle of dark psychological thrillers (Gentlemen & Players, Blueeyedboy, and Different Class).

Born in Barnsley, of an English father and a French mother, she spent fifteen years as a teacher before (somewhat reluctantly) becoming a full-time writer. In 2013, she was awarded an MBE, and in 2022 an OBE. She lives in Yorkshire, plays bass and flute in a band first formed when she was sixteen, and works in a shed in her garden. She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and served for four years as Chair of the Society of Authors. She also has a form of synaesthesia which enables her to smell colours. Red, she says, smells of chocolate.

Fran Warde's career has been fuelled by a passion for food. Trained as a chef, she worked at the Café Royal, on an Australian prawn trawler, ran her own cookery school and then moved into food styling and food writing. She was the food editor at Red Magazine and is the author of Ginger Pig Meat Book, Ginger Pig Farmhouse Cookbook, Food for Friends, Eat, Drink, Live and Thirty Minute Italian and is also co-author of The Little Book of Chocolat, The French Market and The French Kitchen with Joanne Harris. Fran lives in West London with her husband and two children and has been helping as a volunteer at Maggie's, Charing Cross where she met Catherine, and was inspired to feel that this book is really necessary to many people and families.