Joanne Rowling was born on July 31st in 1965 in Chipping Sodury, near Bristol, England. As a little girl she loved writing fantasy stories and then telling them to her little sister Di.
When Jo was nine her parents, both Londoners, turned their longtime country-living dream into reality and the whole family moved to the Gloucestershire village of Tutshill, close to the border of Wales. The girl loved the freedom and simplicity of the countryside. The only problem with her new life was her school. The building was old and outdated and the stern, unfriendly teachers scared the girl. However, with time Rowling made new friends and embraced writing as a hobby.
University Years and the Worst Secretary Ever
After graduating from Wyedean Comprehensive School in 1983, Rowling left home to study at the University of Exeter, on the south coast of England. What she really wanted was to study English; her parents, however insisted that she study something “more useful”. As a result a compromise was found that in retrospect satisfied nobody and Joanne went to study French.
The benefit of majoring in French and Classics was the possibility of spending a year in Paris as part of the program.
The benefit of majoring in French and Classics was the possibility of spending a year in Paris as part of the program.
After getting her BA, Rowling took various jobs in London. One of them was a bilingual secretary position at Amnesty International, where she made two major observations: first, that she could use a computer to type her stories during quiet times; second, that she was “the worst secretary ever “. Instead of taking notes at meetings she was actually writing down story ideas for her books.
The birth of Harry Potter.
The idea of writing, what was destined to become the world’s most popular book, came to Rowling quite unexpectedly. Stuck on a train trip from Manchester to London for four hours she dreamed up a story of a young boy attending a wizardry school, named Harry Potter. Characters and situations came flooding into her head and as it often happens, Rowling did not have a pen to write all these ideas down. As soon as she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she rushed to her typing machine to write, afraid of forgetting even the smallest detail of the story. She had never been so excited about writing a book.
Life’s ups and downs.
In December 1990 Rowling’s mother died after her ten-year battle with multiple sclerosis. The whole family was devastated by her death. It profoundly affected Rowling’s writing too, as she introduced much more detail about Harry’s loss of his parents.
In need of change Rowling left her job and moved to Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. There she met and married a television journalist Jorge Arantes. On 27 July 1993 their daughter Jessica was born. Unfortunately, only four months later the couple separated and Rowling moved to Edinburgh, Scotland to be close to her sister.
This period of life was not easy for her. She got a job as a French teacher, working during the day, taking care of an active toddler in the evening and writing her book during her daughter’s nap time. At this time she saw herself as “the biggest failure” she knew, but this experience was liberating:
” Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea.”
Overnight success and a new name.
In 1995 she finished her book named “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and sent off her typed manuscript to several publishers. Most of them showed no interest. Only seven months later a small publisher, Bloomsbury agreed to take the book on. Later Rowling was asked to use two initials, rather than her full name when signing the book, as publishers were worried that boys might not want to read a book written by a woman. Joanne did not have a middle name, so she chose Kathleen as her second name in memory of her grandmother.
Within a few weeks of publication book sales took off and Rowling was able to start writing full time. After the book’s success in UK, an American company “Scholastic” offered to pay £100,000 for the rights to publish it in United States. In 1998, Warner Bros secured the film rights for the books, giving a seven figure sum.
On the 21st December 2006, J.K.Rowling finished her sixths and final book of the Harry Potter Series – “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. The book was released in July 2007, becoming one of the fastest selling books of all time and Rowling’s earnings surpassed those of the Queen of England.
Plans for the future.
J.K.Rowling currently lives in Scotland, on the banks of the river Tay, with her second husband Neil Murray and their 3 children: two daughters and a son. Even though the Harry Potter series is actually finished, J.K. Rowling continues to write and soon we might be seeing her new book.
J.K. Rowling Quotes:
• Anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.
• It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
• If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
• Death is just life’s next big adventure.
• It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
• If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
• Death is just life’s next big adventure.
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