July 5, 2005. Copyright 2005, Graphic News. All rights reserved

JK Rowling: Wizard with words
By Elisabeth Ribbans

LONDON, July 5, Graphic News:  JK RowlingÕs journey to success began not on her now fictionally famous Platform 9 and 3/4 at KingÕs Cross Station but on a delayed train from Manchester to London in 1990, when the idea for a story about a little boy who discovers that he is a wizard Òsimply fellÓ into her head.

It would be another five years until the former teacher put the final full stop on the manuscript -- completed during snatched hours at an Edinburgh cafe while her baby daughter slept in her pushchair -- and another two before the story hit the bookshelves as Harry Potter and the PhilosopherÕs Stone. But that was the end of the slow train to stardom. Instant critical acclaim meant that RowlingÕs first novel flew like Quidditch sticks off the shelves, with its readers, young and old, clamouring for more tales of HarryÕs adventures at Hogwarts boarding school.

In the eight years since then, Rowling has obliged her legions of international fans with five more books in a promised series of seven. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999) -- both of which topped the adult fiction charts -- were swiftly followed in 2000 by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which notched up a record first print run of one million copies and broke all records for the greatest number of books sold on the first day of publication. In 2003, after being delayed by an unsuccessful plagiarism suit, the doorstep-sized Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was published. A sixth work, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is due out on July 16 -- just ahead of the authorÕs 40th birthday.

This story-telling wizardry has turned Rowling, who was an unemployed, single mum when she finished the first novel, into BritainÕs richest woman, with an estimated fortune of almost £600 million. Her books, which have won scores of prizes in Britain and abroad, have been translated into more than 40 languages, including Latin and Ancient Greek, with the first three becoming blockbuster films, for which she has co-written the screenplays, and the fourth, Goblet of Fire, due for release in November.

Born the eldest of two daughters in Chipping Sodbury, near Bristol, on July 31, 1965, and raised in the Welsh border town of Chepstow, Joanne Rowling studied French at university and, after graduation, took a job as a researcher and bilingual secretary with Amnesty International. In 1991, grief-stricken at the loss of her mother who had died the previous year of multiple sclerosis aged just 45, she moved to Portugal to teach English. She had planned to use the time there to finish her first book but instead she started a family, marrying TV journalist Jorge Arantes in 1992 and giving birth to their daughter Jessica a year later.

The couple divorced shortly afterwards, and in December 1994 Rowling took Jessica to live in Edinburgh, close to her sister, Di. Realising that she had to find a job, but knowing that this and single motherhood would leave her no time to write, she began a race against poverty to get the book finished, writing by hand and typing each finished page herself. It took a year of rejections before Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, suggesting that she use initials instead of her first name so that young boys -- considered the target audience -- were not deterred from reading the book. She added the initial ÒKÓ in memory of her Òfavourite grandparentÓ, Kathleen.

The rest is publishing legend. When Scholastic Books bought the U.S. rights to Harry Potter and the PhilosopherÕs Stone for $105,000 -- an unprecedented sum for a first-time children's author -- Rowling was able to quit her teaching job and write full-time. She now does so from a mansion on the banks of the Tay in Perthshire, Scotland, which she shares with Jessica, her second husband, Neil Murray, a doctor whom she married in 2001, and their two young children David and Mackenzie. As well as her novels, Rowling has written two books for charity, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Quidditch through the Ages. She was awarded an OBE for services to children's literature in 2000.
/ENDS