Reflections through Cyberspace

Was reading about J.K.Rowling and came across these facts about her biography…

1. Joanne Kathleen Rowling was born on July 31st, 1965, in Chipping
Sodbury, Gloucestershire. She has one sister, Diana, who is two years younger.

2. At one time her family lived next door to two children, Ian and Vikki Potter, and Joanne and Diana often played witches and wizards with them. Joanne liked the surname Potter, and never forgot her childhood friends.

3. The idea for Harry Potter came in 1990 while Joanne was travelling on a delayed train between Manchester and London. She said: “Harry just strolled into my head fully formed. I spent four hours thinking about what Hogwarts would be like - the most interesting train journey I’ve ever taken. By the time I got off, many of the characters in the books had already been invented.”

4. In her final year of school, Joanne became Head Girl. She has admitted that the character of Hermione is based on herself, saying: “I wasn’t as clever as I thought I should be. I don’t think I was a know-it-all. I was obsessed with achieving academically, but that masked a huge insecurity.”

5. Joanne thinks that train stations personify romance. Her parents first met on a train out of King’s Cross, the station from which Harry and his friends catch the train to Hogwarts. Pete Rowling and Anne Volant, both 18-year-old Londoners, were travelling to Arbroath in Scotland. Her dad was joining the Royal Navy, her mother the W.R.E.N.s. “My mother said she was cold, my father offered her a half-share in his coat, and they got married just over a year later, when they were nineteen,” Joanne has said.

6. Joanne cites The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge as one of her biggest influences because it describes everything in utmost detail, down to the very food being eaten. She remembers finding that very satisfying as a child. She is also a fan of Jane Austen and C.S.Lewis’s Narnia chronicles.

7. After university, Joanne taught English in Portugal. It was there that she met and married a Portuguese journalist, Jorge Arantes. Their daughter Jessica was born in 1993, but shortly afterwards Joanne and her husband divorced. Joanne left Portugal and went to Edinburgh, where her sister Diana was living, with Jessica and a rough Harry Potter manuscript.

8. When writing the first Harry Potter book, Joanne was on welfare and would sit all day in Edinburgh cafes to escape her depressing flat. Nicolson’s was her favourite: her brother-in-law worked there so they would let her stay all day. Nicolson’s owner Dougal McBride recalls: “She would just rock the pram back and forward with one hand and write away with the other.”

9. Joanne has always refused to name the many publishers who turned down her first Harry novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, but they are thought to include Penguin, Transworld and HarperCollins. Reasons included the book being too long and too slow, and the fact that children wouldn’t want to read about going to school.

10. When Bloomsbury accepted Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and offered Rowling an advance of about £2,000 - a fortune for the struggling young writer at that time - she described the news as “comparable only to having my daughter”.

11. Joanne used the pen name ‘J.K.’ after being advised that boys might not be as interested in reading the books if they knew the author was a woman. She adopted her grandmother’s middle name, Kathleen, for the ‘K’ initial.

12. J.K. has admitted to suffering writer’s block during some of the Harry Potter series. While struggling to finish Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, she seriously considered trying to break her arm so that she could tell her publishers she wouldn’t be able to finish on time. After forcing her publishers to drop her deadline, she enjoyed three years of quiet writing, saying that she spent some time working on something else that she might return to when she is finished with Harry.

13. J.K.’s mother Anne died from multiple sclerosis in 1990 at the age of 45, seven years before the first Harry Potter book was published. Ann had desperately wanted to see her daughter become a successful author. “It adds a little bit of poison to the knife,” J.K. has said. The Mirror of Erised, in which the orphaned Harry sees his parents, is based on her own longing to see her mother again. She said: “You’d want five minutes to say, ‘I have a daughter, and she’s called Jessica, and she looks like this and she likes this, and I wrote some books - and Mum, guess what happened?’”I’d gabble on and at the end of five minutes I’d realise I hadn’t asked what it’s like to be dead. It’s the selfishness of the child, isn’t it? - at least I’m aware of that. But it couldn’t be long enough. That was all in that mirror episode, I think:
recognising that it’s just not healthy, not good for you to dwell and dwell and dwell. It’s not about forgetting, but you have got to move on.”

14. J.K. married for the second time in December 2001 to an anesthetist, Dr. Neil Murray. Her second child, David Gordon Rowling Murray, was born in March 2003, and in January 2005 her third child, a girl, Mackenzie Jean Rowling Murray, arrived, fufilling her lifelong desire to have three children.

15. J.K.’s main home is a 19th century mansion on the banks of the River Tay in Perthshire, Scotland. In the grounds is a sycamore tree said to have sheltered Bonnie Prince Charlie during the ill-fated Jacobite Rising of 1745. She also has houses in Edinburgh and London.

16. J.K. is a huge fan of The Smiths and in 2003 she appeared in the Channel Four documentary ‘The Importance of Being Morrissey’.

17. The Harry Potter series has sold more than 265 million books and has been translated into more than 60 languages. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince looks set to become the world’s biggest-selling novel as soon as it goes on sale.

18. In 2003, J.K. was approached by television producer Russell T. Davies to contribute an episode to the new series of Doctor Who. Although she was “amused by the suggestion”, she turned the offer down as she was busy working on The Half-Blood Prince.

19. J.K. made a guest appearance playing herself in a British-themed episode of The Simpsons entitled ‘The Regina Monologues’. Tony Blair and Sir Ian McKellan also had cameos in the episode, which saw the Simpsons visiting London and Homer colliding with the Queen.

20. Last year, J.K. joined the prestigious US-based Forbes magazine’s list of world billionaires. She’s one of only five self-made female billionairesses on the list, and the first billion-dollar author in the world.