J.K. Rowling
Although she writes under the pseudonym of J.K. Rowling her real name is Joanne Rowling. Her publisher Bloomsbury feared that young boys might not want to buy books written by a female author. He requested that she use two initials instead of revealing her first name. Joanne Rowling had no second name so she chose K for Kathleen.
J.K. Rowling's real name is not Joanne Kathleen Rowling but simply Joanne Rowling or "Jo".
She is the daughter of Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling and was born on the 31st of July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16.1 km) northeast of Bristol.
She has a sister, Dianne or "Di" who was born on the 28th of June 1967 when Rowling was 23 months old(approaching her second birthaday).
The family moved to the village of Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She went to a school founded almost200 years ago. Her elderly headmaster at that school, Alfred Dunn, she claimed as the inspiration for the Harry Potter character Albus Dumbledore.
As a child, Joanne Rowling enjoyed writing fantasy stories, which she often read to her sister. "I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it," she recalls, "Certainly the first story 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."
At the age of nine, Rowling moved to the Gloucestershire village of Tutshill, close to Chepstow, Wales.
She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College
Rowling said: "Hermione is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of."[20] Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books. "Ron Weasley isn't a living portrait of Sean, but he really is very Sean-ish."[21] Of her musical tastes of the time, she said "My favourite group in the world is The Smiths. And when I was going through a punky phase, it was The Clash."[22] Rowling read for a BA in French and Classics at the University of Exeter, which she says was a "bit of a shock" as she "was expecting to be amongst lots of similar people– thinking radical thoughts." Once she made friends with "some like-minded people" she says she began to enjoy herself.[23] With a year of study in Paris, Rowling moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.[24]
In 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into her mind.[25] "I really don't know where the idea came from", she told the Boston Globe, "It started with Harry, then all these characters and situations came flooding into my head."[25][12] When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began to write immediately.[12][26]
However, in December of that year, Rowling’s mother died, after her ten-year battle with multiple sclerosis.[12] Rowling commented, "I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter."[10] Rowling said this death heavily affected her writing[27][10] and that she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.[28]
Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language.[19] While there, on 16 October 1992, she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes. Their one child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford), was born on 27 July 1993 in Portugal.[29] They separated in November 1993.[29][30] In December 1994, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh, Scotland.[12] During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, and contemplated suicide.[31] It was the feeling of her illness which brought her the idea of Dementors, soulless creatures featured in Harry Potter.[32]
Unemployed and living on state benefits, Rowling completed her first novel in many cafés, especially Nicolson's Café,[33] whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep.[12][34]
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