J. K. Rowling Biography

J. K. Rowling	Joanne Rowling Born: 1965-07-31 Birthplace: Gloucester, England Race: White Religion: Anglican/Episcopalian Field: Author Famous for: Author of Harry Potter series J. K. Rowling Offical Website: http://www.jkrowling.com/
Field: Author

Joanne Rowling, OBE (born 31 July 1965), commonly known as J.K. Rowling (pronunciation: role-ing, as in rolling stone) is a British fiction writer. Rowling is most famous as author of the Harry Potter fantasy series, which has gained international attention and won multiple awards. In February 2004, Forbes magazine estimated her fortune as £576 million (just over US$1 billion), making her the first person to become a US dollar billionaire by writing books. Rowling is also believed to be the wealthiest woman in the United Kingdom, well ahead of even Queen Elizabeth II.

J.K. Rowling was born in the General Hospital at Chipping Sodbury, near her parents' home in Yate, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom in 1965. Together with her mother, father, and younger sister, Diana, she moved to Winterbourne, Bristol and then to Tutshill near Chepstow. She attended secondary school at Wyedean Comprehensive, where she told stories to her fellow students. In 1990, her 45-year-old mother succumbed to a decade-long battle with multiple sclerosis.

After studying French and Classics at Exeter University, 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, she had the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry while she was on a four-hour, delayed train trip between Manchester and London. When she had reached her destination, she already had the characters and a good part of the plot for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in her head, which she began working on during her lunch hours.

Rowling then moved to Oporto, Portugal, to teach English as a foreign language. While there she married Portuguese TV journalist Jorge Arantes on 16 October 1992. They had one child, Jessica Rowling Arantes (born 27 July 1993), before their divorce in 1995.

In December, 1994, she and her daughter moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh. Unemployed and living on state benefits, she completed her first novel, doing some of the work in an Edinburgh cafe (there is a widely circulated rumour that she wrote in a local café in order to escape from her unheated flat — but according to the author this is false).

Six of the seven volumes Harry Potter series, one for each of Harry's school years, have already been published.

Before publishing the first volume, Bloomsbury feared that the target group of young boys might be reluctant to buy books written by a female author. They requested that Rowling use two initials, rather than reveal her first name; because she had no middle name, she chose Kathleen, her grandmother's name.

The first book was an unexpectedly huge success. Combined with her earnings for the next three books, she became a billionaire. In 2001, she purchased a luxurious 19th-century mansion, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay in Perthshire, Scotland, where she married her second husband, Dr. Neil Murray, on 26 December 2001.

The fifth book, titled Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was delayed by an unsuccessful plagiarism suit directed towards her by rival author Nancy Stouffer Rowling took some time off from writing at this point, because during the process of writing the fifth book she felt her workload was too heavy. She said that at one point she had considered breaking her arm to get out of writing, because the pressure on her was too much. After forcing her publishers to drop her deadline, she enjoyed three years of quiet writing, commenting that she spent some time working on something else that she might return to when she is finished with the Harry Potter series.