JK
Rowling Biography
Pronunciation: (ROLL-ing)
Joanne Kathleen Rowling entered the world in Chipping Sodbury
General Hospital in Bristol, England, a fitting beginning for
someone who would later enjoy making up strange names for people,
places and games played on flying broomsticks. Her younger sister
Di was born just under two years later.
Rowling remembers that she always wanted to write and that the
first story she actually wrote down, when she was five or six,
was a story about a rabbit called Rabbit. Many of her favorite
memories center around reading-- hearingThe Wind in the Willows
read aloud by her father when she had the measles, enjoying
the fantastic adventure stories of E. Nesbit, reveling in the
magical world of C. S. Lewis's Narnia, and her favorite story
of all, The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge.
The family moved twice while she was growing up. The first move
was across Bristol to Winterbourne, where she and her sister
played with a group of children in the neighborhood. Two of
the children had the surname Potter, a name she remembers liking
very much. Her own name, pronounced "Rolling," led
to annoying jokes about rolling pins from the other children
in school. When Joanne was nine the family moved again, this
time to Tutshill near Chepstow in the Forest of Dean. Her parents
were both Londoners and had a dream of living in the country.
Wandering across the fields and along the river Wye with her
sister was very pleasant to Joanne, but her new school was small
and old-fashioned and the teacher was strict and frightening
to the quiet, imaginative young girl.
Her high school years were spent at Wyedean Comprehensive, where
her favorite subject was English and she did not excel in sports;
she actually broke her arm playing net ball. Her favorite activity
was telling stories to her studious and serious friends over
lunchtime--serial stories, in which they all performed heroic
feats and good deeds. She was made Head Girl in her final year.
At Exeter University Rowling took her degree in French and spent
one year studying in Paris. After college she moved to London
to work for Amnesty International as a researcher and bilingual
secretary. The best thing about working in an office, she has
said, was typing up stories on the computer when no one was
watching. During this time, on a particularly long train ride
from Manchester to London in the summer of 1990, the idea came
to her of a boy who is a wizard and doesn't know it. He attends
a school for wizardry--she could see him very plainly in her
mind. By the time the train pulled into King's Cross Station
four hours later, many of the characters and the early stages
of the plot were fully formed in her head. The story took further
shape as she continued working on it in pubs and cafes over
her lunch hours. Rowling had been writing short stories and
working on two unpublished novels for adults, but now the idea
of Harry Potter took over her writing time.
In 1992 Rowling left off working in offices and moved to Portugal
to teach English as a Second Language. In spite of her students
making jokes about her name (this time they called her "Rolling
Stone"), she enjoyed teaching. She worked afternoons and
evenings, leaving mornings free for writing. After her marriage
to a Portuguese TV journalist ended in divorce, Rowling returned
to Britain with her infant daughter and a suitcase full of Harry
Potter notes and chapters. She settled in Edinburgh to be near
her sister and set out to finish the book before looking for
a teaching job. Wheeling her daughter's carriage around the
city to escape their tiny, cold apartment, she would duck into
coffee shops to write when the baby fell asleep. In this way
she finished the book and started sending it to publishers.
It was rejected several times before she found an London agent,
chosen because she liked his name--Christopher Little, who sold
the manuscript to Bloomsbury Children's Books.
Rowling was working as a French teacher (with students who serenaded
her with the theme song from Rawhide -- "Rolling, rolling,
rolling, keep those wagons rolling . . .") when she heard
that her book about the boy wizard had been accepted for publication.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in June
1997 and achieved almost instant success. It won the Smarties
Book Prize Gold Medal for ages 9-11 and was named the British
Book Awards Children's Book of the Year. It was also shortlisted
for the Guardian Fiction Award and Carnegie Medal (for which
it received a "Commended" citation). At the Bologna
Book Fair, Arthur Levine, an editorial director for Scholastic
Books, bought the American rights for $105,000.00, an unprecedented
figure for a first-time children's author. The advance for the
American edition made it possible for Rowling to quit her teaching
job and write full-time. She had always conceived of the stories
as a seven-book saga and now had the luxury to concentrate on
writing the sequels to the first installment.
With the publication of the American edition, retitled Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, in 1998, Rowling's books continued
to make publishing history. Harry Potter climbed to the top
of all the bestseller lists for children's and adult books.
Indeed, the story of the boy wizard, his Cinderlad childhood,
and his adventures at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
caught the imagination of readers of all ages. In Britain a
separate edition of the first book appeared with a more "adult"
dust jacket so that grown-ups reading it on trains and subways
would not have to hide their copy behind a newspaper. In the
United States, those eager for the second book started ordering
it from Amazon.uk, prompting Scholastic to move up the publication
date from September to June of 1999 for Harry Potter and the
Chamber of Secrets. And when Harry Potter and the Prisoner of
Azkaban was released in September of 1999, all three titles
captured the first, second, and third slots on the New York
Times Bestseller List, remaining there for months afterwards.
In Britain Rowling has won the Smarties Book Prize three years
in a row, the first author to do so, and has requested that
future Harry Potter titles not be considered for the award.
The books have been critically acclaimed in the United States
as well as Britain. Named to the best-of-the-year lists in 1998
by School Library Journal, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Parenting
magazine, and the Cooperative Children's Book Center, Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was also cited as an ALA Notable
Children's Book and ranked Number One on the Top Ten list of
ALA's Best Books for Young Adults. The two sequels that have
appeared so far are also accumulating awards and enjoying worldwide
popularity. To date the books have been translated into approximately
30 languages and have been issued in highly praised audio recordings
as well as print; a major motion picture is scheduled for release
in 2001.
What is the secret of Rowling's remarkable success? Many articles
in journals, interviews on television, and discussions on the
Internet have tried to analyze the ingredients that make the
Harry Potter books irresistible to readers of all ages--the
fast-paced cliffhanger action, the sparkling humor, the Dickensian
names. But perhaps the true secret lies in what Rowling herself
said in an interview published in Book Links magazine: "The
book is really about the power of the imagination. What Harry
is learning to do is to develop his full potential. Wizardry
is just the analogy I use." While magic and wizardry inform
many plot elements, the books are ultimately about the innate
human desire to be unique and special, to form lasting friendships
and connections with others, and to see forces for good triumph
over forces for evil.
Jo Rowling lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with her daughter Jessica
and continues to work on writing the seven-book saga of Harry
Potter.
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