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Joanne “Jo” Rowling, OBE (born July 31, 1965) is an English fiction writer who writes under the pen name J. K. Rowling. Rowling is famously known as the author of the Harry Potter fantasy series, which has gained international attention, won multiple awards, and sold over 300 million copies worldwide. In February 2004, Forbes magazine estimated her fortune at £576 million (just over US$1 billion), making her the first person to become a US-dollar billionaire by writing books.

Early life

Joanne Rowling was born in Yate, South Gloucestershire, England on 31 July, 1965, 12 miles northeast of Bristol. Her sister Dianne was born at their home when Rowling was almost two years old. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four where she attended St Michael's Primary School, later moving to Tutshill, near Chepstow, South Wales at the age of nine. She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College. In December 1990, Rowling’s mother succumbed to a 10-year-long battle with multiple sclerosis. Rowling commented, “I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter. Dad called me at seven o’clock the next morning and I just knew what had happened before he spoke. … I was alternately a wreck and then in total denial. … Barely a day goes by when I do not think of her. There would be so much to tell her, impossibly much.” Her mother’s passing contributed to her own fear of death and its theme in the Harry Potter series.

After studying French and Classics at the University of Exeter (she had previously applied to Oxford but was turned down), with a year of study in Paris, she moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International. During this period, she had the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry while she was on a four-hour delayed-train trip between Manchester and London. When she had reached her destination, she began writing immediately.    

Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While there, she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes on 16 October 1992. They had one child, Jessica, who was named after Rowling’s heroine, Jessica Mitford. They divorced in 1993 after a fight in which Jorge threw her out of the house.

In December 1994, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near Rowling’s sister in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. Unemployed and living on state benefits, she completed her first novel. She did much of the work in the Elephant House café whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep. There was a rumour that she wrote in local cafés to escape from her unheated flat, but in a 2001 BBC interview Rowling remarked, “I am not stupid enough to rent an unheated flat in Edinburgh in midwinter. It had heating.”

Harry Potter

Harry Potter books

In 1995, Rowling completed her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on an old manual typewriter. Upon the enthusiastic response of Bryony Evans, a reader who had been asked to review the book’s first three chapters, the Fulham-based Christopher Little Literary Agents agreed to represent Rowling in her quest for a publisher. The book was handed to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected it. A year later she was finally given the greenlight (and a £1500 advance) by editor Barry Cunningham from the small publisher Bloomsbury. The decision to take Rowling on was apparently largely due to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of the company’s chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father, and immediately demanded the next. Although Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, Cunningham says that he advised Rowling to get a day job, since she had little chance of making money in children’s books. Soon after, Rowling received an £8000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council to enable her to continue writing. The following spring, an auction was held in the United States for the rights to publish the novel, and was won by Scholastic Inc., who paid Rowling more than $100,000. Rowling has said she “nearly died” when she heard the news. In June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher’s Stone with an initial print run of only one-thousand copies, five-hundred of which were distributed to libraries. Today, such copies are each valued at between £16,000 and £25,000. Five months later, it won its first award, a Nestlé Smarties Book Prize. In February, the novel won the prestigious British Book Award for Children’s Book of the Year, and, later the Children’s Book Award. In October 1998, Scholastic published Philosopher’s Stone in the US under the title of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, a change Rowling claims she now regrets and would have fought if she had been in a better position at the time.

In December 1999, the third Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the Smarties Prize, making Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth Harry Potter novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance. In January 2000, Prisoner of Azkaban won the inaugural Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year award, though it narrowly lost the Book of the Year prize to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. That June, the Queen honoured Rowling by making her an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

To date, six of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter series, one for each of Harry’s school years, have already been published and all have broken sales records. The last three volumes in the series have been the fastest-selling books in history, grossing more in their opening 24-hours than blockbuster films. Book six of her series earned The Guinness World Records Award for being the fastest selling book ever. The sixth book of the series sold more copies in 24-hours than The Da Vinci Code sold in a year. (The Da Vinci Code was the best-selling book of the previous year.)

Rowling is currently writing the seventh and final book of the series. Its title is currently unknown. On June 26, 2006, Rowling revealed that in the final book of the Harry Potter series at least two characters will die, one of whom may be Harry himself.  Author Stephen King asked Rowling not to kill off Harry in book seven during a press conference, but Rowling remained ambiguous regarding Harry’s fate.

In June 2006, the British public named Rowling “the greatest living British writer” in a poll by The Book Magazine. Rowling topped the poll, receiving nearly three times as many votes as the second-place author, fantasy writer Terry Pratchett.

Her name

Rowling's full name is "Joanne Rowling", not, as is often assumed, "Joanne Kathleen Rowling". Before publishing her first volume, Bloomsbury feared that the target group of young boys might be reluctant to buy books written by a female author. They requested that Rowling use two initials, rather than reveal her first name. As she had no middle name, she chose K from her grandmother's name Kathleen, as the second initial of her pseudonym. The name Kathleen has never been part of her legal name. She calls herself "Jo" and claims, "No one ever called me 'Joanne' when I was young, unless they were angry." Her surname is pronounced like "rolling" (IPA: /rəʊ.lɪŋ/), not a rhyme for "howling".

Current life and family

In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious 19th-century estate house, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Rowling also owns a home in Morningside, Edinburgh, and a Georgian house in London, on a street where, according to The Guardian, the average price of a house is £4.27 million ($8 million), possibly including an underground swimming pool and 24-hour security.

On 26 December 2001, Rowling married Dr. Neil Murray, an anaesthetist, in a private ceremony at her home in Aberfeldy. Their son David Gordon Rowling Murray was born on March 3rd, 2003, shortly after Rowling began writing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Rowling took a break from working on the novel to care for him in his early infancy. Rowling's youngest child, Mackenzie Jean Rowling Murray, to whom she dedicated Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was born in January of 2005.

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