MEET
J.K. ROWLING
"I
am an extraordinarily lucky person, doing what I love best in the
world. I'm sure that I will always be a writer. It was wonderful enough
just to be published. The greatest reward is the enthusiasm of the
readers." |
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Harry Potter's magic has touched a huge audience of all ages all over the
world. In America, there are over 103 million books in print, and each title
has been #1 on The New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestseller
lists. The sixth title, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, set a new
world record for a first printing, with 10.8 million copies hitting stores
on July 16, 2005.
J. K. Rowling has won the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Whitbread
Award for Best Children's Book, a special commendation for the Anne Spencer
Lindbergh Prize, and a special certificate for being a three-year winner
of the Smarties Prize, as well as many other honors. She has been a featured
guest on "60 Minutes," "The Today Show," and "Larry
King Live." Rowling has also been named an Officer of the British Empire.
Rowling first thought of Harry while riding a train back in 1990. "Harry
just strolled into my head fully formed." She worked on the book for
several years, finding quiet moments while her daughter napped. Several
publishers turned down the finished manuscript before one took interest.
In 1998, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was published in the United
States, kicking off Harry-mania. Suddenly, kids were reading again, and
their parents wanted to read the same books! The second and third books
were published in the spring and fall of 1999.
On July 8, 2000, the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire became
a major celebration, with bookstore events occurring at midnight nationwide.
The book sold an unprecedented three million copies in the first 48 hours
of release, winning the title of "fastest-selling book in history"
— a title later claimed by Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
when it was released on June 21, 2003.
Warner Bros. enjoys certain rights in respect to all the Harry Potter books
and has exercised its option to create films on all of those that have been
published to date. With over a quarter of a billion books sold, the books
have been translated into 61 languages and distributed in over 200 countries.
All five books have appeared on bestseller lists in the United States, Britain,
and around the globe.
J.
K. (Jo) Rowling was born in Chipping Sodbury in the UK in 1965. Such a funny-sounding
name for a birthplace may have contributed to her talent for collecting
odd names.
Jo moved
house twice when she was growing up. The first move was from Yate (just
outside Bristol in the south west of England) to Winterbourne (on the other
side of Bristol). Jo, her sister and friends used to play together in her
street in Winterbourne. Two of her friends were a brother and sister whose
surname just happened to be Potter! The second move was when Jo was nine
and she moved to Tutshill near Chepstow in the Forest of Dean. Jo loved
living in the countryside and spent most of her time wandering across fields
and along the river Wye with her sister. For Jo, the worst thing about her
new home was her new school.
Tutshill Primary School was a very small and very old-fashioned place. The
roll-top desks in the classrooms still had the old ink wells. Jo's teacher,
Mrs Morgan, terrified her. On the first day of school, she gave Jo an arithmetic
test, which she failed, scoring zero out of ten. It wasn't that Jo was stupid
- she had never done fractions before. So Jo was seated in the row of desks
far to the right of Mrs Morgan. Jo soon realised that Mrs Morgan seated
her pupils according to how clever she thought they were: the brightest
sat to her left, and those she thought were dim were seated to her right.
Jo was in the 'stupid' row, 'as far right as you could possibly get without
sitting in the playground'.
From Tutshill Primary, Jo went to Wyedean Comprehensive. She was quiet,
freckly, short-sighted and not very good at sports. She even broke her arm
playing netball. Her favourite subject by far was English, but she also
liked languages.
Jo always loved writing more than anything. 'The first story that I ever
wrote down, when I was five or six, was about a rabbit called Rabbit. He
got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called
Miss Bee. And ever since Rabbit and Miss Bee, I have wanted to be a writer,
though I rarely told anyone so. I was afraid they'd tell me I didn't have
a hope.'
At school, Jo would entertain her friends at lunchtime with stories. I used
to tell my equally quiet and studious friends long serial stories at lunchtimes.
In these stories, Jo and her friends would be heroic and daring. As she
got older, Jo kept writing but she never showed what she had written to
anyone, except for some of her funny stories that featured her friends as
heroines.
After
school, Jo attended the University of Exeter in Devon where she studied
French. Her parents hoped that by studying languages, she would enjoy a
great career as a bilingual secretary. But as Jo recalls, 'I am one of the
most disorganised people in the world and, as I later proved, the worst
secretary ever.' She claims that she never paid much attention in meetings
because she was too busy scribbling down ideas. 'This is a problem when
you are supposed to be taking the minutes of the meeting,' she says.
When she was 25, Jo started writing a third novel ('I abandoned the first
two when I realised how bad they were'). A year later, she went to Portugal
to teach English, which she really enjoyed. Working afternoons and evenings,
she had mornings free to write. The new novel was about a boy who was a
wizard.
When she returned to the UK, Jo had a suitcase full of stories about Harry
Potter. She moved to Edinburgh with her young daughter and worked as a French
teacher. She also set herself a target: she would finish the 'Harry' novel
and get it published. In 1996, one year after finishing the book, Bloomsbury
bought Jo's first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
'The moment I found out that Harry would be published was one of the best
of my life, says Jo. A few months after 'Harry' was accepted for publication
in Britain, an American publisher bought the rights for enough money to
enable Jo to give up teaching and write full time - her life's ambition!
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