FIFTEEN novels down the line, Joanne Harris has become a household name – in no small part thanks to the Oscar-nominated adaption of her bestseller Chocolat. But no amount of success or acclaim has been able to shake her dread of the blank page.

Over the years, she has devised shrewd ways to evade writer’s block– namely by always juggling several projects at once – but the sense of trepidation never lets up.

“I live in fear of being blocked in some way,” admits the Yorkshire-born author.

“I find that the rhythms of my writing mean that I come to a point where I have to give it a rest, some thinking time or research time and during that time I will work on something else.

"I’m always working on two or three things at a time so I’m never in a situation where I cannot progress.”

Born to an English father and French mother, Harris read modern and medieval languages at Cambridge before following in her parents’ footsteps and becoming a French teacher, settling at Leeds Boys' Grammar.

An ardent story teller, she would fit writing sprees around teaching and raising a young child. Her novels’ growing success prompted her to take a sabbatical and eventually give up teaching altogether to write full-time.

She soon learned to realign her expectations of life as a full-fledged author with reality. Between her various engagements, obligatory festival appearances and campaigning for the Society of Authors, she rarely has the luxury to wait around for the muse’s call.

In many ways her work pattern has remained virtually unchanged and it’s a constant race against the clock to slot writing time in her diary.

“I’ve never really felt that I had the luxury of as much time to write as I wanted to,” she says.

“When I was a teacher, my time was very constrained and being a full-time writer I’ve still not got very much time. I’ve got all sorts of things to do which are really not directly connected to writing books.

"I’ve got used to clawing back time to work with. It still feels like having a full-time job and writing in your free time even now.”

Her experience of moulding young minds inspired her book, Gentlemen and Players, in 2005. It is a dark thriller following eccentric Latin master Roy Straitley at the exclusive St Oswald’s Grammar School.

A decade on and Harris introduces the sequel, Different Class, at the Festival of Literature.

She picks up where her character left off, a year after a wave of distressing events, which culminate in murder. St Oswald’s is brought to the brink of ruin but Straitley and the depleted team are slowly steering the school back to steadier shores. But things take a sombre turn with the arrival of the new headteacher, an ex-pupil of Straitley’s. He was the boy at the heart of a scandal that ended with a St Oswald’s master in jail.

“Pretty much all my books are about the effect that the past has on people because I think we’re the combination of all the things that have happened to us. Different Class is another story where the past comes to interfere with the present.”

Delving into her own teaching days for inspiration is not a decision she took lightly - not then or now. But after releasing her acclaimed ‘gastromance’ Chocolat and a series of period works, she was satisfied enough time had passed to safely revisit that chapter of her life.

“I was always going to write about it at some point because it’s an interesting community. I didn’t do it straight away because I wanted to get some distance from actual teaching. I think I was waiting for some of my colleagues to retire or die,” she deadpans.

“I think inevitably it was going to be based in the experiences that I had but it’s not like a guess who they were in a real life book.”

True to form, Harris is already on to the next project(s). She is toiling away at a sequel to The Gospel of Loki and compiling a volume of short stories she initially posted on Twitter.

A keen Tweep, she has embraced social media as a tool to engage with her readers and explore new ways of spinning tales.

“It started as a sort of experiment,” she adds excitedly. “It’s a completely different form of narrative. What you get is a small sentence, almost primitive, that sounds old-fashioned like a fairy tale.”

She recently started performing songs based on these Twitter stories with her band.

Experiments like these, and a huge body of work spanning genres, go some way to explain how she has survived more than 15 years in an often fickle and highly competitive industry. She credits her basic need to write, regardless of gain or recognition, for her longevity.

“So many people tell you how difficult it is to break into publishing and how difficult it is to make a living from it when you do, that you don’t expect anything to happen at all,” she says without a hint of false modesty.

“You just have to enjoy what you do. People who feel that they ought to be a writer or that they’re going to be terribly wealthy by being a writer don’t really enjoy writing. If you’re writing for yourself then you’ll always be sustained. If you write for a future book deal you’ll end up being disappointed. The love of it will keep you going, so why would you stop?”

Joanne Harris will be at the Central Library on May 11 at 7.30pm. To book go to swindontheatres.co.uk.