strong>J. K. Rowling: A Story of Faith, Persistence, and Imagination
Joanne Kathleen Rowling is a British children’s writer and one of the wealthiest women in the United Kingdom. She was born on July 31, 1965, in Chipping Sodbury, England. Her younger sister, Dianne, was born two years later. From early childhood, Joanne loved telling stories. She wrote her first fairy tale at the age of five or six—it was about a rabbit named Rabbit who had measles, visited by his friends along with a giant bee called Miss Bee.
During her childhood, Rowling moved twice with her family, first to Yate and then to Winterbourne, towns near Bristol. In Winterbourne, Joanne and her sister played with a brother and sister named Potter. She later said that she liked this surname and even preferred it to her own, as children often teased her name, comparing it to rolling pins.
When Joanne was nine years old, the family moved again, this time to Tutshill. There she received her primary education and later continued her studies at Wyedean School. At that time, she was a shy, short-sighted, freckled girl who was not interested in sports. Her favorite subjects were English and foreign languages. She often invented stories for her friends, in which they performed brave and heroic actions they would never attempt in real life.
After finishing school, Joanne enrolled at the University of Exeter, where, at her parents’ insistence, she studied French. They believed she would be able to find work as a bilingual secretary.
In 1991, at the age of 26, Joanne moved to Portugal to teach English. She enjoyed teaching, working in the afternoons and evenings, while dedicating her mornings to writing. During this period, she began working on her third novel, as her first two had not been successful.
The new story was about a boy who discovered that he was a wizard and entered a magical school.
While in Portugal, Joanne married a Portuguese journalist. The marriage later ended in divorce, after which she moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, with her daughter, to be closer to her younger sister, Dianne.
She was determined to finish the novel about Harry and attempt to have it published before returning to teaching French. Soon, the Scottish Arts Council awarded her a grant to complete the book. After receiving several rejections, Joanne eventually sold Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to Bloomsbury Publishing in the United Kingdom for 4,000 US dollars.
A few months later, the American rights were purchased by Arthur A. Levine Books, for a sum large enough to allow Rowling to leave teaching and focus entirely on writing.