“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
Joanne Rowling, a British writer, film producer, and screenwriter, is best known as the author of the Harry Potter series, which has sold over five hundred million copies worldwide.
This literary success meant that the 2008 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling’s fortune at £560 million, placing her as the twelfth richest woman in the United Kingdom. Likewise, Forbes ranked Rowling fortieth on its list of the most powerful celebrities of 2007, and Time magazine selected her as a runner-up for “Person of the Year” in the same year, highlighting the social, moral, and political inspiration she has given to the characters of Harry Potter.
Pseudonym
Although she writes under the pseudonym J. K. Rowling, her real name is Joanne Rowling. Before publishing her first novel, the publisher Bloomsbury feared that younger readers would be reluctant to buy books written by a woman and asked her to use two initials rather than her first name. As she does not have a middle name, she chose the letter K as her second initial in honor of her paternal grandmother, Kathleen. The name Kathleen has never been part of her legal name.
After her marriage, she often uses the name Joanne Murray when conducting private affairs. She calls herself Jo, saying: “No one called me Joanne when I was a child, unless they were angry with me.”
Birth and Childhood
Rowling was born on July 31, 1965, in Yate (United Kingdom), the daughter of Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling (née Volant). Her sister Dianne, “Di,” was born at the family home on June 18, 1967, when Rowling was 23 months old. The family moved to the nearby village of Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She attended St Michael’s Primary School, an establishment founded by the famous abolitionist William Wilberforce and the activist Hannah More in 1813.
It is believed that her first headmaster at St. Michael’s, Alfred Dunn, was the inspiration for the character of Albus Dumbledore.
“Hermione is loosely based on me. She’s a caricature of me when I was eleven, though I’m not particularly proud of it.”
Education
After St Michael’s, she attended Wyedean School and College, where her mother worked in the science department. Steve Eddy, her first English teacher at high school, remembers her as “not exceptional, though from a group of girls who were very good at the language.”
In 1982, Joanne took the entrance exams for Oxford University but was not accepted, so she went to the University of Exeter instead. Martin Sorrell, a French professor at Exeter, remembers her as “a quietly competent student, with a denim jacket and dark hair, who, in academic terms, gave the appearance of doing what was necessary.” Rowling admits that she preferred reading Dickens and Tolkien to doing her university assignments. After a year of study in Paris, Rowling graduated from Exeter in 1986. In 1988, she wrote a brief essay about her time studying the classics titled: “What was the Name of that Nymph Again? or Greek and Roman Studies Recalled”; it was published by Pegasus, the magazine of the University of Exeter.
The Beginnings of Harry Potter
The idea for Harry Potter occurred to her in 1990 while she was waiting on a train that had broken down on the journey from Manchester to King’s Cross station in London—it was delayed for four hours. However, she had to wait until she could put her ideas in writing because she didn’t have a pen…
During that event, the idea of a school for wizards came to her. “Suddenly, the idea of Harry just appeared in my imagination. I can’t say why, or what triggered it, but I saw the idea of Harry and the wizard school very clearly. Suddenly, I had the basic idea of a boy who didn’t know who he was, who didn’t know he was a wizard until he received an invitation to attend a magic school.”
“I’ve never been so excited about an idea.” “I don’t know where the idea came from,” she told the Boston Globe. “It started with Harry, and then all the characters and situations flooded into my head.”
When she reached her apartment at Clapham Junction, she began writing immediately. That same year, her mother passed away—a very hard blow for her, as she was the only person who supported her ideas of being a writer, after fighting multiple sclerosis for ten years. Rowling commented, “I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I never got to tell her about Harry Potter.” Rowling said that this death deeply affected her work as a writer and that she included many more details about Harry’s loss in the first book because she knew how it felt.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was sold for only £3,000, after being rejected many times by different literary agencies.
Curiosities
- She originally considered naming Harry Potter “Jacob.”
- She based the character of Hagrid on a friend of hers who was a biker.
- She became the first person to win the Children’s Book of the Year award three times.
- She wrote the names of the Hogwarts houses on an airplane sick bag.
- She almost abandoned writing the fourth book while working on Chapter 9, “The Dark Mark,” out of fear.
- As she has recounted on several occasions, while living in Edinburgh, she used to walk through Greyfriars Kirkyard, where the name for Gryffindor House occurred to her.
- The Hogwarts Transfiguration professor, Minerva McGonagall, owes her name to the English poet William McGonagall, who died in 1902.
- The curious name of the character played by Alan Rickman, Severus, which sounds like a serious fellow who follows rules, comes from a street she used to walk along while thinking of her magical world: Severus Road, located in Clapham, England.
- She has also used the pseudonym Robert Galbraith to write without the pressure of her fame.
Wealth and Estate
Forbes has named Rowling as the first person to earn a billion US dollars by writing books, the second richest female artist, and the 1,062nd richest person in the world. When she first appeared on the Forbes billionaires list in 2004, Rowling did the math and said she had a lot of money but was not a billionaire. In 2001, Rowling bought a luxurious 19th-century estate near the River Tay in Aberfeldy, Scotland. She also owns a house in Merchiston, Edinburgh, and a mansion in Kensington, West London.
Family Facts
On December 26, 2001, Rowling married Neil Michael Murray, an anesthetist, in a private ceremony at her mansion in Aberfeldy. It was the second marriage for both. They have a son, David Gordon Rowling Murray (born March 24, 2003). Shortly after Rowling began writing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, she decided to take a break to raise her son.
Rowling’s youngest daughter, Mackenzie Jean Rowling Murray—to whom Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was dedicated—was born on January 23, 2005. From her first marriage to Portuguese journalist Jorge Arantes, she has a daughter named Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes.
Religious and Political Views
Rowling is a member of the Church of Scotland. She once said: “I believe in God, I don’t believe in magic.” She later realized that if readers knew she was a Christian, they might be able to guess what would happen in the books. In a 2007 interview, she stated that her own struggle with religious beliefs is evident in the seventh book.
Regarding politics, Rowling has shared that she was obsessed with the 2008 US elections. She stated that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would be “extraordinary” in the White House and named Robert F. Kennedy as her hero.
Honorary Distinctions
National:
- Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE, 2000).
Foreign:
- Knight of the Legion of Honour, French Republic (2009).
- Order of the Smile, Republic of Poland.
- In 2003, in Oviedo, Spain, she became the first writer to receive the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord.
Honorary Degrees: Rowling has received honorary degrees from the University of St Andrews, the University of Edinburgh, Napier University, and the University of Aberdeen.
Bibliography
Children’s:
- The Ickabog (2020)
- The Christmas Pig (2021)
Young Adult (Harry Potter Series):
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998)
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000)
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003)
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005)
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007)
Related Works:
- Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2001)
- Quidditch Through the Ages (2001)
- The Tales of Beedle the Bard (2008)
- Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (play) (2016)
- Short Stories from Hogwarts: Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies (2016)
- Short Stories from Hogwarts: Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists (2016)
- Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide (2016)
Adult:
- The Casual Vacancy (2012)
- Cormoran Strike Series (as Robert Galbraith): The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, Career of Evil, Lethal White, Troubled Blood.
Filmography:
- Harry Potter films (based on her novels)
- The Casual Vacancy (TV miniseries)
- Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Screenplay)
- Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (Screenplay)
- Strike (TV series based on the Cormoran Strike novels)
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