J. K. Rowling

Author

• Born: July 31, 1965
• Place of Birth: Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire, England

Author J. K. Rowling is best known for the internationally popular Harry Potter series, which proved influential among a wide range of audiences and became a cultural phenomenon. Eventually expanding upon but also publishing outside of this beloved series, she continued to be a prominent, if controversial, public figure.

BRITISH AUTHOR

Early Life

Joanne "Jo" Rowling was born in the town of Yate in South Gloucestershire, England. She is the daughter of Peter James Rowling, a former engineer at Rolls-Royce, and Anne Rowling (née Volant), who died from complications of multiple sclerosis in 1990. (The "K" in Rowling's pen name stands for "Kathleen," which was her grandmother's name and was added after Bloomsbury publishers wanted her to use initials to sound more like a male author.)

When Rowling was nine years old, the family moved to the small village of Tuthill, near the Welsh border in the Forest of Dean. She attended Wyedean Comprehensive and went on to study French and the classics at Exeter University. She then went to Moray House Teacher Training College in Manchester, England, but she did not immediately seek work as a teacher. Instead, she went to London to work as a secretary and as a research assistant for Amnesty International. It was while traveling between Manchester and London by train in 1990 that she came up with the idea of writing a series of novels describing the unorthodox schooldays of a teenage wizard named Harry Potter.

In 1991, Rowling went to Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. Because she worked in the afternoons and evenings, she was able to spend her mornings writing, but her progress was slow and her production mostly consisted of voluminous notes and disconnected chapters. In 1993, she returned to England, eventually taking up residence in Edinburgh.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Rowling worked on the first volume of her projected series of novels, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, in coffee shops. It took until 1995 to finish the book, and it was not accepted for publication until 1997. Rowling was then able to obtain a grant of £8,000 from the Scottish Arts Council to continue work on the second volume in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which was published in 1998.

The initial advance for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was only £1,500, but the novel was very carefully marketed by its initial publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, which gave away most of the first edition to schools, hoping to obtain word-of-mouth publicity for the subsequent paperback. This ploy worked and ensured that most of the hardcover copies sustained sufficient wear and tear to make the remainder very valuable, retailing for tens of thousands of pounds. The novel won the Smarties Book Prize Gold Medal and was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Award and the Carnegie Medal. When rights to the book were auctioned in the United States, they went to Scholastic for $105,000, then a record sum for a children’s book, and Warner Bros. subsequently bought film rights to the first two volumes. The US edition of the first volume was retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone on the assumption that American children were more likely to be sympathetic to the idea of sorcery than to the concept of philosophy.

Harry Potter Series and Adult Novels

When the third novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was published in 1999, the magnitude of the burgeoning phenomenon was fully revealed. The three novels shot to the top of the American best seller lists, and the sale of further film rights ensured that Rowling rapidly became the highest-earning woman in Great Britain and the second-wealthiest, after Queen Elizabeth II. In 2000, the year in which book four, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was published, Rowling set up the Volant Charitable Trust, which took its name from her mother’s maiden name, to channel some of her wealth back into society.

In 2001, Rowling produced two brief volumes that were spun off from the series, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, written under the pseudonym of Newt Scamander, and Quidditch through the Ages, written by the pseudonymous Kennilworthy Whisp. The two books benefited the charity Comic Relief, with their sales raising £15.7 million for the organization. The fifth volume in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was not published until 2003.

Bloomsbury had made the launch of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire into a large-scale public event that was so successful that the publishing house was forced to narrow the focus of subsequent book launches in the series, especially in view of the expectation built up by the anticipation of its belated successor. The publishing company did everything possible to control not merely the day of release but the moment the books were issued; the remaining books were all released at the stroke of midnight, with potential purchasers often lining up for hours or days beforehand. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix set a new world record for the rapidity of book sales, which was then broken by the sixth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, published in 2005.

Although the bans on premature release proved unenforceable, this public relations strategy succeeded in maintaining a high level of anticipatory excitement, especially in regard to the seventh and climactic volume, in which it was widely rumored beforehand that the hero might die. Harry Potter’s death was a possibility that would have previously been unthinkable in a children’s book, but it did not seem unlikely in the new context of expectation that Rowling had created. Although The New York Times broke ranks by publishing a review of the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the day before its publication, the reviewer was careful not to reveal the ending. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold 2.7 million English-language copies in its first twenty-four hours of publication on July 21, 2007, beating its predecessor’s record comfortably. The book soon racked up total worldwide sales of eleven million copies.

In 2008, Rowling published The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which is a collection of fairy tales for wizard children and is described as a collection of many of the themes found throughout the Harry Potter series. The book by the same name was referred to in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In addition, the Harry Potter series was adapted into eight films between 2001 and 2011, starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson.

After becoming arguably the biggest name in modern children's literature, Rowling tried her hand at adult literature. In 2012, she published The Casual Vacancy. The book tells the story of the small, rural town of Pagford during the race to elect someone to fill a vacancy on the local council left by the death of a councilman. The book filters the story through a number of different perspectives and investigates issues of class and local politics. Reviews of the book as a whole were lukewarm, and ranged from those who disliked the book outright, to those who said it was good, but not great. Despite the reviews, the book became a best seller. In 2015, The Casual Vacancy was made into a three-part miniseries by the BBC and HBO. The series, which starred Potter alum Michael Gambon, aired to positive reviews.

In 2013, a debut crime fiction writer named Robert Galbraith released their first novel, The Cuckoo's Calling, to several good reviews and little attention. Several months after its release, it was leaked that Robert Galbraith was actually a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling, and the book sold out. Rowling explained that she had wanted to write a book without the pressure of being the author of the Harry Potter series and have the book succeed or fail on its own merits. Following the success of The Cuckoo's Calling, Rowling continued the Cormoran Strike series as Galbraith with The Silk Worm (2014), Career of Evil (2015), and Lethal White (2018). Meanwhile, in 2017, the series was adapted into a miniseries by BBC One and HBO, with a fifth season airing in 2022.

Rowling has also returned to the world of Harry Potter, but in extended universe works. She worked along with playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany develop the story for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play set in the Harry Potter universe that continues the story of the famous trio of Harry, Ron, and Hermione (and their children) nineteen years after the principal events of the books, which also coincides with the epilogue to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The two-part play premiered on July 30, 2016, at the Palace Theatre in London, England. Rowling also penned her first screenplay, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which follows the wizard Newt Scamander on an adventure in the wizarding world of 1920s New York. The film, which stars Eddie Redmayne as Scamander, was released in theaters in November 2016. The second film, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, was released in 2018; Rowling served as both screenwriter and producer.

Rowling continued to write into the 2020s. As well as publishing the children's books The Ickabog (2020) and The Christmas Pig (2021), she remained involved with ongoing adaptations of her Harry Potter books for the screen, serving as both screenwriter and producer for Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022). Writing under her pen name Robert Galbraith, she also published additional novels in the Cormoran Strike series, including Troubled Blood (2020), The Ink Black Heart (2022), and The Running Grave (2023).

Controversy

The runaway success of the Harry Potter series established Rowling as a celebrity in her own right, and by the first decade of the 2000s she had begun speaking out on various political and social issues. Many of her statements centered on politics in the United Kingdom; for example, in 2016, she spoke out against the so-called Brexit referendum and in favor of the UK remaining in the European Union. By the end of the 2010s, however, some of her views had begun to generate significant controversy, particularly her comments and views on transgender people. Many fans and activists, as well as some former actors from the Harry Potter film series, criticized Rowling's views as transphobic. Despite this backlash, a small number of feminists and activists voiced their support for Rowling. As she further publicized her perspectives on gender identity into the 2020s, debates continued over her writing legacy and her personal reputation.

Personal Life

Rowling married a television journalist named Jorge Arantes in 1992, but the marriage soon failed and they divorced in 1993. The couple had a daughter, Jessica, who was born the same year. In 2001, Rowling bought Kilchassie House, a nineteenth-century mansion in Perthshire, to serve as a home for the new family created by her marriage to Neil Murray, an anesthetist whom she wed in a private ceremony at the house on December 28, 2001. She had two children with Murray: David Gordon Murray, born in 2003, and Mackenzie Murray, born in 2005.

Bibliography

"About." JKRowling.com, www.jkrowling.com/about/. Accessed 29 July 2024.

Aitkenhead, Decca. "J. K. Rowling: 'The Worst that Can Happen Is That Everyone Says, That's Shockingly Bad.'" The Guardian, 21 Sept. 2012, www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/22/jk-rowling-book-casual-vacancy. Accessed 24 Mar. 2016.

Beahm, George. Muggles and Magic: An Unofficial Guide to J. K. Rowling and the Harry Potter Phenomenon. 2d ed. Hampton Roads, 2006.

Blake, Andrew. The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter: Kid-Lit in a Globalized World. Verso, 2002.

Bury, Liz. "J. K. Rowling Tells Story of Alter Ego Robert Galbraith." The Guardian, 24 July 2013, www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/24/jk-rowling-robert-galbraith-harry-potter. Accessed 24 Mar. 2016.

Gardner, Abby. "A Complete Breakdown of the J.K. Rowling Transgender-Comments Controversy." Glamour, 11 Apr. 2024, www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk-rowling-transgender-comments-controversy. Accessed 29 July 2024.

Kirk, Connie Ann. J. K. Rowling: A Biography. Greenwood Press, 2003.

Lyall, Sarah. "J. K. Rowling Just Can't Let Harry Potter Go." The New York Times, 1 June 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/theater/jk-rowling-just-cant-let-harry-potter-go.html. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.

Parker, Ian. "Mugglemarch." The New Yorker, 1 Oct. 2012, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/01/mugglemarch. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.

Smith, Sean. J. K. Rowling: A Biography. Michael O’Mara Books, 2001.

Whited, Lana A., editor. The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon. U of Missouri P, 2004.