A SHORT BIOGRAPHY ON J.K. ROWLING.

Joanne Rowling was born on 31st July 1965. Dianne, her younger sister, was born almost two years later and Joanne’s earliest childhood memory is of Dianne’s arrival. She, her sister and her parents lived in Winterbourne, Gloucestershire, until Joanne was nine, when the family moved to Tutshill, near Chepstow.

Joanne grew up surrounded by books as her mum and dad loved reading – she says, ‘I lived for books … I was your basic common-or-garden bookworm, complete with freckles and National Health spectacles.’ From an early age Joanne wanted to be a writer. She wrote her first book at the age of six – a story about a rabbit called Rabbit. Then when she was eleven she wrote a novel about seven cursed diamonds and the people who owned them. 

Joanne went to school at Wyedean Comprehensive School and then went on to study French and Classics at the University of Exeter. Her Classics studies would come in very handy later when she was thinking up all the spells in Harry Potter, some of which are based on Latin!

J.K. Rowling first had the idea for Harry Potter while delayed on a train travelling from Manchester to London King’s Cross in 1990. Over the next five years, she began to plan out the seven books of the series. She wrote mostly in longhand and amassed a mountain of notes, many of which were on scraps of paper. 

She arrived in Edinburgh in 1993 with three chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in her suitcase. By now she had a baby daughter, Jessica, but she continued to write in every spare moment she could find. When Joanne had finished the manuscript, she sent the first three chapters to a number of literary agents, one of whom wrote back asking to see the rest of it. She says that it was ‘the best letter I had ever received in my life’. 

After finishing the first book and whilst training as a teacher, Harry Potter was accepted for publication by Bloomsbury. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone quickly became a bestseller on publication in 1997. As the book was translated into other languages, Harry Potter started spreading round the globe – and J.K. Rowling was soon receiving thousands of letters from fans.