Joanna Kathleen Rowling

J.K.Rowling was born on July 31 in the year 1965. She started reading alot in her younger years and already showed a talent of inventing stories which she told to her little sister Diana. She describes herself as a quiet, freckled and rather unathletic girl that earned high grades at her school. She already then dreamed of writing books then but didn’t tell anybody.

Rowling later studied French and Classics at the Exeter University and after that had various jobs including being a secretary, a teacher or working for Amnesty International. The death of her mother 1990 and being fired from her job made her reevaluate her life.

Before writing Harry Potter she tried to write adult fiction and even finished two books but didn’t publish them because she questioned the quality of them.

The idea of Harry Potter literally struck her in a broken down train on the way to London. She said that the character and the setting already were fully formed and she just had to write them all down. During the next five years she outlined the story for the whole seven books and started to write the first novel. Soon after that Rowling moved to Portugal to work as an English teacher and married a Portuguese television journalist in 1992. She had her daughter Jessica. Her works on the first novel were interrupted when she got divorced from her husband and moved to Scotland were her sister Diana lived in 1993. She stayed there for another six months. Because she couldn’t find a job she had to apply for public assistance and decided to write full time on her book until finding another job. She confers to that time as her „Grim Period“. She mostly wrote in cafes after putting her daughter asleep. Rowling says that writing about Harry Potter was her way of coping with her personal crisis and after finishing it boosted her morale deliberately.

Harry Potter first was rejected by several publishers until it got accepted by Bloomsbury. They insisted though that Rowling used her initials „J.K.“ rather than Joanne because they thought boy readers would think a woman couldn’t write about a boy hero.
After that Harry almost immediately became a great success. It was translated into many languages and sold all over the world. Rowling now enjoys going on promotion tours all over the world with her daughter but still prefers living a rather anonymous live and consider herself as being a celebrity.
Rowling still pretty much follows her pre-Harry Potter patterns like going to her favourite cafes and spending time with her daughter.

  

Holger