Joanne K. Rowling
July 31, 1965
Also known as: Robert Galbraith | J. K. Rowling | Kennilworthy Whisp | Mlok Scamander
Joanne K. Rowling is a British writer who became known with the Harry Potter series of novels about the wizard student of the same name. She is also active as a screenwriter and film producer.
She is also known under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. After Forbes magazine first estimated her fortune at one billion US dollars in 2004, she was considered the richest writer in world history for several years. According to Forbes, Rowling is the highest-paid writer in the world as of 2020 and the 2nd highest-earning author in the world after James Patterson.
Joanne Rowling was born in 1965 in the small town of Yate near Bristol in southwest England, the daughter of Anne and Peter Rowling. Her middle initial, "K," her grandmother's first name "Kathleen," Rowling later added herself. Her parents are from London and married in March 1965.Peter Rowling worked at Rolls-Royce, Anne Rowling as a laboratory assistant.
After Joanna's birth, the Rowling family moved to Winterbourne, where they started school in 1970. Rowling had the desire to become a writer from an early age. When she was five or six years old, she made up her first story – it was about a rabbit suffering from measles. She told these and other stories to her sister Dianne, who was two years younger. In 1974, the Rowling family moved to Tutshill, near Chepstow, Wales.
There she attended the Wyedean Comprehensive School. She was elected a student representative at the higher school. The later character of the novel, Hermione Granger, is supposed to correspond to the image she had of herself at the time, both externally and in character.
After graduating in 1983, she studied French and Classical Studies at the University of Exeter. After graduating in 1987, which included a one-year stay as an English teacher in Paris, she worked in various office positions. Among other things, she worked for Amnesty International in London for two years. In 1989, she moved to Manchester to live with her then-boyfriend. During this time, she worked on two adult novels, which she never published and later destroyed.
In her own words, she invented the Harry Potter character during a train journey from Manchester to London in 1990. She knew from the beginning that it would be a seven-part book series about a young wizard who attends a boarding school for witches and wizards. On December 30, 1990, Rowling's mother died of multiple sclerosis at the age of 45. In 1991, Rowling went to Portugal, where she worked as an afternoon teacher at the English school Encounter in Porto. During this time, she wrote a lot about the first of her Harry Potter books.
In March 1992, she met the Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes, whom she married on October 16, 1992. After their first daughter was born in 1993, Rowling and Arantes separated in November of that year, as Arantes engaged in violent conflict. Rowling moved to the UK and settled in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh. As a single mother of a toddler, she was living on welfare at the time while continuing to work on her first book.
In 1995, she completed the first part, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. A year later, she signed a contract with literary agent Christopher Little. After the agency offered the work to several publishers and repeatedly received rejections, Bloomsbury Publishing accepted the manuscript in August 1996. He had also rejected it before, but then reconsidered it on the recommendation of his youth book manager, Barry Cunningham. However, Cunningham advised Rowling to find a job again, because you can't make a living from children's books alone. Rowling therefore completed a postgraduate course at the University of Edinburgh in order to be able to work as a teacher again. The book was not to be published under Rowling's full first name, Joanne, because the publisher was concerned that boys would be reluctant to read books written by a woman. Rowling therefore decided to use her initials "J.K.". The Harry Potter volumes are still published in Great Britain today under the author's name "J. K. Rowling".
In 1997, on June 26, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was released in an initial print run of 500 copies. Just three days after the publication of the first Harry Potter novel, the American publisher Scholastic surprisingly bought the American rights to Rowling's first work at auction for $100,000. According to Rowling's contract with her agent, she received 80 percent of it. The fact that a six-figure sum was paid for the first work by an unknown author of children's books made Rowling known in one fell swoop. In September 1997, the Hamburg publishing house Carlsen Verlag acquired the rights to all seven announced novels in the series for the German-speaking world. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was published the following year in a print run of 8000 copies.
Volume 2, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was completed by Rowling shortly after the publication of the first volume and was published in 1998. In 1999, a translation into German followed. The first two books were already selling well, but the world finally learned about Rowling after the release of the third part, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 1999. For example, the first through third volumes occupied the top three spots on the New York Times bestseller list for several months starting in October 1999. The fourth volume, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, published in 2000, was published in a record first edition of one million copies each in the UK and Germany, and 3.8 million copies in USA.Im 2000. including the film rights, Time Warner, but retained the publishing rights and a say in the films. She campaigned for Harry Potter not to become an animated film and not to be cast by American actors.
In 2001, on December 26, Rowling married doctor Neil Murray. Numerous factors – work on two charity editions for Comic Relief (see below), her wedding, and finally her second pregnancy (the son was born in 2003) – delayed work on the fifth volume, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It was finally published in June 2003 in an even larger circulation than the previous volume, 2 million copies in Deutschland.Am January 23, 2005, Rowling became a mother (second daughter) for the third time in Edinburgh. The sixth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which she completed in December 2004, was released on July 16, 2005.
On January 11, 2007, Rowling completed work on the seventh and final book. She wrote the date on a marble bust in a hotel room in Edinburgh, where she last worked on the book: J.K. Rowling finished writing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in this room (552) on January 11, 2007. Since then, she has said several times, including an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2010, that she might one day write more Harry Potter books, and has said that material up to and including Part 10 is available without any problems. To date, the Harry Potter novels have been translated into 80 languages, including Latin and Ancient Greek, and have sold more than 500 million copies. Rowling is considered one of the richest women in the UK, with Forbes magazine estimating her wealth at one billion US dollars between 2004 and 2007. However, in the 2007 documentary A Year in Life of J.K. Rowling, she denied this, saying that it was even less than the estimated £570 million.
Books for adults After completing the Harry Potter heptalogy, Rowling turned to other projects. In July 2007, the author stated in an interview that she was currently working on a book for adults and one for children. In March 2008, she revealed that the latter was a "political fairy tale". However, it was not published and, according to the author, was "in a drawer" for years because she felt that it was "not good enough". In May 2020, its name The Ickabog was finally announced; The book was published on November 10, 2020.
In July 2011, her agent Neil Blair left the agency Christopher Little and founded The Blair Partnership, which he still represents today. On February 23, 2012, the agency announced in a press release that Rowling's new adult book would be published for the foreseeable future. The first details, including the original English title The Casual Vacancy and the approximate number of pages, were published on April 13, 2012. The publisher is no longer Bloomsbury Publishing, but Little, Brown and Company. On July 11, 2012, Carlsen Verlag announced the German title Sudden Death. The book was released worldwide on September 27, 2012, and received both positive and mixed reviews.
Writer of detective stories In April 2013, Joanne Rowling, now under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, published the crime novel The Cuckoo's Call. By July of the same year, around 1500 copies had been sold. On July 14, 2013, the Sunday Times published an article exposing her as the author of the book. Earlier, the newspaper received a tip to this effect, which was confirmed by a stilometric examination. The following year, a sequel to the series was released, following Cormoran Strike's protagonist, The Silkworm.
J. K. Rowling has repeatedly talked about publishing an encyclopedia of Harry Potter. In October 2007, she filed a lawsuit against the planned Harry Potter encyclopedia by Steve Vander Ark, which was due to be published in the UK in December 2007. Arks Verlag (RDR Books) took the position that it had not infringed any copyright. Michael Maar published the Harry Potter handbook in 2008 in collaboration with Help for the Hufflepuffs. Rowling herself finally announced the launch of Project Pottermore in 2011. It was a website about the world of Harry Potter, which will be regularly updated with new information from behind the scenes. E-books from the Harry Potter series were also sold through the platform. An earlier version of the website contained a visualized and interactive version of the novels.
Film and theatre Since 2013 at the latest, Joanne Rowling has been writing the screenplay for the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which is based on the Harry Potter "textbook" of the same name, which she published. A good year later, she announced via Twitter that she was currently optimizing the script and was already working on another novel on the side. The latter is the next installment in the Cormoran Strike series and was published in German in February 2016 under the title The Harvest of Evil.Rowling also participated in the production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which premiered in the West End in 2016. The screenplay was written by Jack Thorne based on a story by Rowling, Thorne, and John Tiffany, and was released as a hardcover drama on July 31, 2016. Despite the difficult way to read for many consumers, the book sold more than 680,000 copies in the UK in its first three days. Since September 24, 2016, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has also been available for purchase in Germany. The German version is called Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and in 2016. In 2020, it was the best-selling book in Germany, the Harry Potter films and attractions in the Wizarding World of Universal Studios (which does not include the Harry Potter books) were Rowling's biggest source of income.