J. K. Rowling

Joanne Rowling was born on July 31, 1965, in Yate, near Bristol, and grew up in villages in the west of England, first Winterbourne and later the Forest of Dean area. She made up stories from an early age. At Wyedean School she became head girl. She applied to Oxford in 1982, was turned down, and studied French and classics at the University of Exeter, with a year in Paris along the way. She graduated in 1987.

Years of temp jobs followed. She took a bilingual secretarial course, worked in London offices, researched human rights abuses in French-speaking Africa for Amnesty International and spent time at the Manchester Chamber of Commerce. In 1990, on a delayed train from Manchester to London, she got the idea of a boy who doesn't know he is a wizard until he is called to a school of magic. She spent the whole ride building that world and its characters in her head.

The first book took five years. In that stretch she lost her mother, moved to Porto, Portugal, to teach English, got married, had a daughter, separated and came back to the UK. In Edinburgh, living on government benefits, she finished the manuscript. Twelve publishers passed. Bloomsbury said yes, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone came out on June 26, 1997, with a first print run of 5,650 copies. The publisher wanted initials on the cover, and the K came from her grandmother Kathleen. In the US, Scholastic paid $105,000 for the rights and released the book in 1998 as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

From there, every volume outsold the last. Bookstores opened at midnight for release nights, and the main series wrapped in 2007 with Deathly Hallows. The books grow up with the reader. They start as a school adventure and get longer and darker, dealing with death, prejudice, abuse of power and loyalty. Rowling mapped the arc early and planted clues that only pay off books later, which keeps fans rereading. Goblet of Fire won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2001, and in 2004 Forbes named her the first billion-dollar author.

Warner Bros. bought the rights to the first two books in 1999. Eight films followed between 2001 and 2011, with the last book split in two. She made her screenwriting debut with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in 2016, which got sequels in 2018 and 2022. On stage, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play by Jack Thorne based on a story by Thorne, Rowling and John Tiffany, opened in London in 2016 and on Broadway the same year. A TV series adapting one book per season was announced in 2023, with Rowling as executive producer.

Outside Hogwarts, she published The Casual Vacancy in 2012, her first novel for adults. In 2013 The Cuckoo's Calling came out under the name Robert Galbraith, and the pen name was exposed a few months later. The cases of detective Cormoran Strike and his partner Robin Ellacott are still going, with the eighth book, The Hallmarked Man, in 2025, and became the BBC series Strike. For children, she wrote The Ickabog, released free online during the 2020 pandemic, and The Christmas Pig in 2021.

Rowling lives in Edinburgh and is married to doctor Neil Murray. Since 2019 she has drawn criticism for her public views on gender identity, which critics describe as exclusionary toward trans people. Her honors include the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord in 2003 and appointment to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2017.