J.K. Rowling

Joanne Rowling (born 31 July 1965) is an English fiction writer who writes under the pen name J. K. Rowling. Rowling is the author of the Harry Potter fantasy series, which has gained international attention, won multiple awards, and sold over 377 million copies worldwide. In February 2004, Forbes magazine estimated her fortune at £576 million (just over US$1 billion), making her the first person to become a US-dollar billionaire by writing books. In 2006, Forbes named her the second richest woman entertainer in the world, behind talk show host Oprah Winfrey.

Early Life

Joanne Rowling was born at Yate, South Gloucestershire, 19 km northeast of Bristol, UK on 31 July 1965. Her sister Dianne (Di) was born at their home when Rowling was 23 months old. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four where she attended St Michael's Primary School, later moving to Tutshill, near Chepstow, South Wales at the age of nine. She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College. Rowling was good with languages, but did not excel at sports and mathematics. There are numerous references to Welsh places, things, and people in Harry Potter, which could be attributed to her time in Chepstow.

In December 1990, Rowling’s mother succumbed to a 10-year-long battle with multiple sclerosis. Rowling commented, “I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter.”

After studying French and Classics at the University of Exeter (she had previously applied to Oxford but was turned down), with a year of study in Paris, she moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International. During this period, while she was on a four-hour delayed-train trip between Manchester and London, she had the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry. When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began writing immediately.

Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While there, she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes on 16 October 1992. They had one child, Jessica, who was named after Rowling’s heroine, Jessica Mitford. They divorced in 1993 after a fight in which Jorge threw her out of the house.

In December 1994, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near Rowling’s sister in Edinburgh, Scotland. Unemployed and living on state benefits, she completed her first novel. She did her work in numerous different cafés (e.g. Nicolson's Cafe and Elephant House Café), whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep. There was a rumour that she wrote in local cafés to escape from her unheated flat, but in a 2001 BBC interview Rowling remarked, “I am not stupid enough to rent an unheated flat in Edinburgh in midwinter. It had heating.”

Current life and family

In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious 19th century estate house, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Rowling also owns a home in Merchiston, Edinburgh, and a Georgian house in London, on a street where, according to The Guardian, the average price of a house is £4.27 million ($8 million), possibly including an underground swimming pool and 24-hour security.

On 26 December 2001, Rowling married Neil Murray, an anaesthetist, in a private ceremony at her home in Aberfeldy. Their son David Gordon Rowling Murray was born on 24 March 2003. Shortly after Rowling began writing Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, she took a break from working on the novel to care for him in his early infancy. Rowling's youngest child, Mackenzie Jean Rowling Murray, to whom she dedicated Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was born in January of 2005.

Charity

In 2001, the UK fundraiser Comic Relief asked three bestselling British authors, (Rowling, cookery writer and TV presenter Delia Smith, and Bridget Jones creator Helen Fielding), to submit booklets related to their most famous works for publication. For every pound raised, a pound would go towards combatting poverty and social inequality across the globe. Rowling's two booklets, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages, are ostensibly facsimiles of books found in the Hogwarts library, and are written under the names of their fictional authors, Newt Scamander and Kennilworthy Whisp. Since going on sale in March, 2001, the books have raised £15.7 million ($30 million) for the fund. The £10.8 million ($20 million) raised outside the UK has been channelled into a newly created International Fund for Children and Young People in Crisis. She has also personally given £22 million to Comic Relief.

Rowling has contributed money and support to many other charitable causes, especially research and treatment of multiple sclerosis, from which her mother died in 1990. This death heavily affected her writing, according to Rowling. In 2006, Rowling contributed a substantial sum toward the creation of a new Centre for Regenerative Medicine at Edinburgh University. For reasons unknown, Scotland, Rowling's country of adoption, has the highest rate of MS in the world.

In January 2006, Rowling went to Bucharest to raise funds for the Children's High Level Group, an organization devoted to enforcing the human rights of children, particularly in eastern Europe.

On 1 August-2 August 2006 she read alongside Stephen King and John Irving at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Profits from the event were donated to the Haven Foundation, a charity that aids artists and performers left uninsurable and unable to work, and the medical NGO Médecins Sans Frontières.

After Harry Potter

Harry Potter has made Rowling a well known and a very successful author, but after Rowling finishes the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, she plans to continue writing. Rowling declared, in a recent interview, that she will most likely not use a new pen name as the press would quickly discover her true identity.

In 2006, Rowling revealed that she had completed a few short stories and another children's book (a "political fairy story") about a monster, aimed at a younger audience than Harry Potter readers.

She is not planning to write an eighth Harry Potter book, but has suggested she might publish an "encyclopedia" of the Harry Potter world consisting of all her unpublished material and notes. Any profits from such a book would be given to charity.

She has also stated that she would like to write books on crime after finishing the Harry Potter series.

Thanks to Wikipedia for all of this information!

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