Joanne Kathleen Rowling was born on July 31st, 1965 in Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire, and grew up in Chepstow, Gwent. At school, her
favourite subject was English, but when she went to
Exeter University (where incidentally she was a year below me -- and no, I'm afraid I don't remember her) she studied French, with a view to pursuing a career as a
bilingual secretary. After graduating from Exeter in 1986, she was for a while,
"the worst secretary ever".
In 1990, at the age of 26, she moved to
Portugal to teach English, a career she enjoyed, and she met and married a Portuguese
journalist. Their daughter, Jessica, was born in 1993, and she started writing the first of the Harry Potter books. This was the third novel she had started, but the other two were abandoned.
When her marriage ended in divorce, Rowling and her daughter moved to Edinburgh, where she still lives, to be close to her younger sister, Di. Rowling was suffering from
depression, and set herself a challenge - to finish the
novel before she started work as a French teacher, and get it published. She wrote at a café table while Jessica was napping.
Rowling says she wrote
Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone, the first novel in the series, when
"I was very low, and I had to achieve something. Without the challenge, I would have gone stark raving mad." The Dementors, the shadowy life-draining guards of the Wizards' prison at Azkaban, which appear in the third and fourth book of the series, are powerful
personifications of depression.
The Scottish
Arts Council gave her a
grant to finish the book and, she eventually sold it to Bloomsbury, in the UK, after a number of rejections. She sold the US rights a few months later to Arthur A Levine Books/Scholastic Press. This latter sale was
lucrative enough to allow her to give up teaching, and concentrate on writing.
The book was published in the UK by Bloomsbury Children's Books in June 1997 and won the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year, and the Smarties Prize. It was published in the US as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
The second book,
Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets was published in the July 1998 (and also won the Smarties Prize), the third,
Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban was published in the UK in July 1999, and the fourth
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in July 2000. The last book was a best-seller on presales alone with advance orders of over 1.8 million, and the first three books have sold more than 35 million copies in 35 languages.
Rowling plans a seven book series, to take Harry up to school leaving age, with each book chronicling one school year, and with the
themes covered and the level of
maturity of the writing growing up with Harry to provide a
progression for readers.
The film rights for the first two books have been sold to Warner brothers and production of the
movie version of The Sorcerer's Stone is underway.
In 2000 Rowling was awarded an
honorary Doctorate of Letters by Exeter
University.
Apparently, she still writes at
café tables.