The mind that created the beautiful, smart and brave character of Hermione was a very imaginative girl named Joanne Rowling. She was born on 31st July 1965. Dianne, her younger sister, was born almost two years later and Joanne’s earliest childhood memory is of Dianne’s arrival. She, her sister and her parents lived in Winterbourne, , until Joanne was nine, when the family moved to Tutshill, near . Joanne grew up surrounded by books as her mum and dad loved reading. She wrote her first book at the age of six – a story about a rabbit called “Rabbit”. When she was eleven she wrote a novel about seven cursed diamonds and the people who owned them. Joanne proved to be more suitable for letters than for maths. She studied French, Latin and Ancient Greek. At school she met a series of people who will then inspire the characters of Hogwarts. Her best friend will become , the principal will be Albus Dumbledore and her hated professor of biology will be . is herself at the age of 11. In 1982 she took the exam to attend Oxford, but she didn’t pass it. When she retreated at the University of Exeter, her mother became ill with multiple sclerosis. After a year of study in Paris and graduation, she moved to London. She found a job as a researcher and bilingual secretary at Amnesty International. She moved to Manchester with her boyfriend to work at the Chamber of Commerce, a bureaucratic temple that will probably inspire the Ministry of Magic. In 1990, one day Joanne was at a station waiting for a train to London four hours late, and conceived the whole idea of a novel about a child with magical powers. She started writing it in the following days. In the same period her mother died. She moved once more to Porto, Portugal, to teach English. It was in Portugal that she married journalist Jorge Arantes on October 16, 1992. Jessica was born from the union on July 27th 1993. In the same year, Joanne separated from her husband and then moved to Edinburgh with her daughter, with the idea of living with her sister. After this Portuguese parenthesis, a very gloomy period began for the author, marked by a strong depression and a disastrous financial situation: being unemployed, she had to pay the rent of her apartment and raise her daughter with unemployment benefits alone. Joanne, taking advantage of the walks to put the little Jessica in the stroller to sleep, she went to work at her brother-in-law's pub. In the same period she worked with passion to carry on her novel, which she considered to be the cure for that deep crisis she was going through. From that period she recalls a particular thought, referring to Jessica: "... it was a surprise every morning to see her still alive". Joanne, in fact, believed that, in that period, every beautiful thing would go wrong like everything else, and that she would never be happy or carefree. From this dark moment of her life, the writer has extracted the figure of the Dementors, creatures that "suck up peace, hope and happiness from the air that surrounds them". In 1995 she finished writing her novel for boys titled “ and the philosopher's stone”. She had chosen a single literary agent to whom she could send the first chapters of the book, because the agent had a "child" name that inspired her. His name was Christopher Little, he had an office in Fulham and immediately decided to trash the manuscript because he thought that children's books did not sell anymore. He changed his mind after an enthusiastic review from one of his collaborators, Bryony Evens, who had appreciated the gothic subconstruction of the story. The agency called Joanne asking for the complete manuscript and and stipulated a contract for publishing her.