Biography J.K. Rowling

My mother and father were both Londoners. They met on a train travelling from King's Cross station to Arbroath in Scotland when they were both eighteen. They got married just over a year later. They moved to the suburbs of Bristol, in the West of . My mother gave birth to me when she was twenty, I was a fat baby.

My sister Di arrived a year and eleven months after me. Di had - and still has - very dark, almost black hair, and dark brown eyes like my mother's, and she was considerably prettier than I was (and she still is).

There were lots of children around our age living in our new street, among them a brother and sister whose surname was Potter. I always liked their name, whereas I wasn't very fond of my own. Anyway, the brother has since told the press that he 'is' Harry. His mother has also told reporters that he and I used to dress up as wizards. Neither of these stories is true.

I enjoyed school in Winterbourne. It was a very relaxed environment; I remember lots of pottery making, drawing and story writing, which suited me perfectly. However, my parents had always had a dream of living in the country, and around my ninth birthday we moved for the last time, to Tutshill, a small village just outside , in Wales. The move happened at almost exactly the same time as the death of my favourite grandparent, Kathleen, whose name I later took when I needed an extra initial.

The worst thing that happened during my teenage years (when I was fifteen) was my mother becoming extremely ill. I left school in 1983 and went to study at the University of Exeter, on the south coast of England. I studied French, which was a mistake. I wanted to study English, but my parents pressured me. On the plus side, studying French meant that I had a year living in Paris as part of my course.

After leaving university I worked in London; my longest job was with Amnesty International, the organisation that campaigns against human rights abuses all over the world. But in 1990, my then boyfriend and I decided to move up to Manchester together. It was after a weekend's flat-hunting, when I was travelling back to London on my own on a crowded train, that the idea for simply fell into my head.

I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but I had never been so excited about an idea before. To my immense frustration, I didn't have a functioning pen with me, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one. I think, now, that this was probably a good thing, because I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, and all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this thin, black- haired, boy with glasses, who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me. I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have left out some of them.

I began to write 'Philosopher's Stone' that very evening, although those first few pages are nothing like those in the finished book. I moved up to Manchester, taking the manuscript with me, which was now growing in all sorts of strange directions, and including ideas for the rest of Harry's career at Hogwarts, not just his first year. Then, on December 30th 1990, something happened that changed both my world and Harry's forever: my mother died.

It was a terrible time; she was only forty five years old and we had never imagined that she could die so young.

Then there came a time that the Harry Potter book was finally done. I covered the first three chapters in a nice plastic folder and sent them to an agent, who returned them so fast they must have been sent back the same day they arrived. But the second agent I tried wrote back and asked to see the rest of the manuscript.

It took a year for my new agent, Christopher, to find a publisher. Lots of them turned it down. Then, finally, in August 1996, Christopher telephoned me and told me that Bloomsbury had 'made an offer.' I could not quite believe my ears. 'You mean it's going to be published?' I asked, rather stupidly. 'It's definitely going to be published?' After I had hung up, I screamed and jumped into the air; Jessica, who was sitting in her high-chair enjoying tea, looked really scared.

And you probably know what happened next.