NEVER meet your heroes, they say, it can only lead to crushing disappointment.

And nine times out of ten, it ends in tears; for the disillusioned and rightly miffed fan anyway. Thankfully, Joanne Harris (MBE) was just the affable, witty and slightly impish spinner of tales her novels hazily reveal -not least Chocolat, which brought her worldwide acclaim and was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Johnny Depp – at the Swindon Festival of Literature last night. And a refreshingly honest and approachable one at that. Far from an overnight success, she found her feet slowly in the fickle world of publishing.

And unlike many authors who made it big and seem to draw a line under the dog days when rejection letters poured in day after day (she actually made a sculpture out of hers), she had no qualms revisiting the disappointments with surprising humour and a heavy dose of self-deprecation.

After her first novel (a vampire horror), she was dropped by her publisher when she veered off course and penned a Victorian gothic piece. Finally when no one would consider printing her next work her agent sent the manuscript to a big gun in the States who concluded her stories were too parochial, featured too many pensioners and definitely not enough sex. And what was it with the food? Call her crazy -she did admit to a penchant for annoying people and proving them wrong -she set out to write a story set in the most parochial community possible, slapped in oodles of elderly characters and called it Chocolat. And the rest is history.

Since then she has written 12 more novels across genres, two collections of short stories and a trio of cookery books. Not bad for a French teacher who started writing while teaching at Leeds Grammar School.

Of course she had always had an interest in stories but when she told her mother, a teacher married to a teacher with lots of teachers friends at the age of nine that she wouldn't mind breaking family tradition, her mother showed her a bookcase filled with masterpieces by 18 century French authors who famously starved to death penniless. Young Joanne did agree a stable job in teaching may not be so bad after all.

So she taught for years though she never quite fit or wished to fit the mould. During her talk at the Central Library she remembered fondly but not without a twinkle in her eye the politics of teaching at a patriarchal grammar school - one of just five female teachers - and being given a box to stand on when she couldn't reach the blackboard. When told she had to drop the trouser suits (far too modern even in the 80s for such an old fashioned school) she turned up in a red plastic skirt. She was never asked to wear a frock or skirt again.

Her teaching career, which she left reluctantly and to her mother's horror, certainly would have provided a wealth of stories and yet she steered clear of that nest of vipers for eight years.

"I was probably waiting for some of old colleagues to die and I also needed a safe distance, " she explained.

She eventually put her fear and reticence behind her and released psychological thriller Gentlemen and Players in 2005, set in the seemingly idyllic boys’ grammar school, St Oswald’s.

Her latest book Different Class, which she unveiled at the Lit Fest is its sequel and digs deeper into the pitfalls of teaching and moulding impressionable young minds. The novel picks up a year after a wave of distressing events which culminated in murder, (saying more would reveal Harris’s shrewd twist) brought St Oswald’s to the brink of ruin and its Latin Master Roy Straitley close to death. In this new installment, Roy and the depleted team are slowly steering the school back to steadier shores.

But things take a sombre turn with the arrival of a new headteacher who turns out to be an ex-pupil of Straitley’s and the boy at the heart of a scandal that ended with a St Oswald’s master in jail. As a teacher she came to realise how easily an educator's words and actions can shape a student and stay with them for life. And this is at the crux of Different Class. How far would a slighted pupil go to get revenge? And if he does, who is to be held responsible?

"Nobody gets to be a monster on purpose," she concluded enigmatically. "Something makes them that way. The line between abusers and victim is not always easy to spot."