Nonetheless, do you feel there is a distinctive/common feature or fingerprint to be found across your works that mark out a Joanne Harris book? Yours is such an eclectic oeuvre of books that they defy categorisation by genre or audience. He would run the initial sketches past me for comment, but they were already so beautiful by then that I really didn’t ask for changes… I didn’t want to be too controlling when it came to his choice of subject or his interpretation of the text, so I mostly left him to his own devices. Working with Charles was marvellous – I’d always seen this as an illustrated fairy book for adults, in the tradition of Golden Age illustrators, so I was thrilled when he agreed to be a part of the project.

I always take an active interest in jacket design, and worked closely with Sue Gent, who produced the marvellous cover. Did you have much input into the cover production/design? And what was your reaction when you first laid eyes upon the illustrations?

Your clothbound edition of Honeycomb is absolutely stunning, the illustrations by award-winning Charles Vess are such a delight too and really enhance the reading experience. The overarching themes and returning characters developed slowly over a period of six years or so, which is when I realized that this could become a book. I wrote most of these little stories live on Twitter, as part of my #Storytime hashtag, so the form – and to a certain extent, the language – was dictated by the medium. Had you always planned to write Honeycomb as a series of short dark fairy-tales, or did the short story form naturally occur as you began writing? It’s set in the same expanded Nine Worlds as my LOKI books (THE GOSPEL OF LOKI, RUNEMARKS) and my Child Ballad-inspired novellas (ORFEIA, A POCKETFUL OF CROWS), and it follows the tale of the Lacewing King, ruler of the Silken Folk, a version of the Fae, from his birth and coming-of-age, through his many adventures (and misadventures) on his journey through the Worlds. HONEYCOMB is a kind of hybrid novel and short story collection, in which every story intersects in some form – thematically, or by introducing a character, or by advancing the main plot – with every other. Find out more at or follow her on Twitter to the Hive Joanne!Ĭongratulations on the release of your latest collection of stories, Honeycomb. She plays bass guitar in a band first formed when she was 16, is currently studying Old Norse, and lives with her husband and daughter in Yorkshire, about 15 miles from the place she was born. Her hobbies are listed in Who’s Who as ‘mooching, lounging, strutting, strumming, priest-baiting and quiet subversion’. Joanne Harris is the author of the Whitbread-shortlisted CHOCOLAT (made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp) and many other bestselling novels.

Joanne m harris honeycomb