Joanne Harris
Novelist & Authors’ Advocate
Chocolat author who, as long-time chair of the UK Society of Authors, campaigned against unregulated generative AI and signed the 2025 letter demanding the government summon Meta over its use of pirated books.
In her words
Global tech companies must now be held accountable and pay for the use they make of authors’ works.
Failure to act without further delay will unquestionably have a catastrophic and irreversible impact on all UK authors.
Biography
Joanne Harris (b. 1964) is the British novelist behind Chocolat (1999) — adapted into the Oscar-nominated film with Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp — and a shelf of bestsellers from Blackberry Wine to her Norse mythology novels. She chaired the Society of Authors’ management committee for two terms until 2024 and served on the board of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society.
Institutional resistance
Harris’s opposition to unlicensed AI has been institutional as much as personal: during her years leading the Society of Authors and on the ALCS board she campaigned against the unregulated use of generative AI, pressing for consent, transparency and payment as the emerging norm for training data, and for ethical-AI commitments across publishing.
After The Atlantic revealed in March 2025 that Meta had trained Llama 3 on the pirated LibGen library of over 7.5 million books, Harris signed the Society of Authors’ letter to Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy — alongside Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Val McDermid and Kate Mosse — calling on the government to summon Meta executives before Parliament and require them to pay authors for historic infringements. The accompanying petition drew more than 50,000 signatures.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/joanne-harris