Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 63.160.38.114 (talk) at 15:14, 29 March 2006. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

hi sean

Joanne "Jo" Rowling, OBE (born 31 July 1965) is an English fiction writer who writes under the pen name of J. K. Rowling. (see below) Rowling became famous as author of the Harry Potter fantasy series, which has gained international attention, won multiple awards, and sold over 300 million copies worldwide. In February 2004, Forbes magazine estimated her fortune at £576 million (just over US$1 billion), making her the first person ever to become a $US billionaire by writing books. hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi

Early life

Joanne Rowling was born in South Gloucestershire, England on 31 July, 1965. Rowling was born while her parents were living on the outskirts of Bristol. There is some confusion as to exactly where; Rowling has said she was born in Chipping Sodbury, whereas her birth certificate apparently claims she was born in the Cottage Hospital at Yate . Her sister Di was born when Rowling was almost two . The family moved to Winterbourne, Bristol when Rowling was four, and then to Tutshill, near Chepstow, Wales at the age of nine. She attended secondary school at Wyedean Comprehensive. In December 1990, Rowling's mother succumbed to a decade-long battle with multiple sclerosis.

After studying French and Classics at the University of Exeter, with a year of study in Paris, she moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International. During this period she had the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry while she was on a four-hour, delayed train trip between Manchester and London. When she had reached her destination, she began writing immediately .

Rowling then moved to Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While there, she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes on 16 October 1992. They had one child, Jessica, before divorcing in 1993. Their daughter was named after Rowling's heroine, Jessica Mitford.

In December, 1994, she and her daughter moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh. Unemployed and living on state benefits, she completed her first novel, doing some of the work in local Edinburgh cafes whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep. There was a rumour that she wrote in local cafés in order to escape from her unheated flat, but in a 2001 BBC interview Rowling remarked, "I am not stupid enough to rent an unheated flat, in Edinburgh, in mid-winter; it had heating".

Harry Potter

Harry Potter books

In 1995, Rowling completed her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on an old manual typewriter. After several rejections, a year later she was finally given the greenlight by the editor Barry Cunningham from the small publisher Bloomsbury. She then received a grant from the Scottish Arts Council to enable her to continue writing. The following spring, an auction was held in the United States for the rights to publish the novel, and was won by Scholastic Inc, who paid Rowling more than $100,000. Rowling has said she "nearly died" when she heard the news. In June, 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher's Stone and five months later it won its first award, a Nestle Smarties Gold Award. In February, the novel won the prestigious British Book Award for Children's Book of the Year, and, later the Children's Book Award. In October 1998, Scholastic published Philosopher's Stone in the States under the title of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, a change Rowling now claims she regrets and would have fought if she had been in a better position at the time. .

In December 1999, the third Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,won the Smarties Prize, in the process making Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth Harry Potter novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance. In January, 2000, Prisoner of Azkaban won the inaugural Whitbread Children's Book of the Year award, though it narrowly lost the Book of the Year prize to Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. That June, Rowling received an OBE from the Queen.

To date, six of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter series, one for each of Harry's school years, have already been published and all have broken sales records. Upon its publication, the fourth novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the fastest-selling book in history.

Rowling is currently writing the seventh and final book of the series. Its name is currently unknown.

Harry Potter films

In October, 1998, Warner Brothers purchased the film rights to the first two novels for a seven-figure sum. A film version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was released on November 16, 2001 and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on November 15, 2002. Both were directed by Chris Columbus. The June 4, 2004 film version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was directed by Alfonso Cuarón. The fourth film, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was directed by yet another new director, Mike Newell.

All four films were scripted by Steve Kloves; Rowling assisted him in the writing process, ensuring that his scripts do not contradict future books in the series. She says she has told him more about the later books than anybody else, but not everything. She has also said that she has told Alan Rickman and Robbie Coltrane certain secrets about their characters that have not yet been revealed.

A film of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is now in production, under British television director David Yates, and new screenwriter Michael Goldenberg, projected for release in the summer of 2007.

After Harry Potter

Harry Potter has made Rowling a well known and a very successful author, but after Rowling finishes the final Harry Potter book, she plans to continue writing, possibly using a pen name.

Rowling recently revealed that she has completed a few short stories and another children's book (a "political fairy story") about a monster, aimed at a younger audience than Harry Potter readers.

Her name

Rowling's full name is Joanne Rowling, not, as is often assumed, "Joanne Kathleen Rowling." Before publishing her first volume, Bloomsbury feared that the target group of young boys might be reluctant to buy books written by a female author. They requested that Rowling use two initials, rather than reveal her first name. As she had no middle name, she chose K from her grandmother's name Kathleen, as the second initial of her pseudonym. The name Kathleen has never been part of her legal name. She calls herself "Jo" and claims, "No one ever called me 'Joanne' when I was young, unless they were angry". Her surname is pronounced like "rolling" (IPA: /rəʊ.lɪŋ/).

Current life and family

In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious 19th-century mansion, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay in Perthshire, Scotland. Rowling also owns a Georgian style house in London, on a street where, according to The Guardian, the average price of a house is £4.27 million ($11 million), possibly including an underground swimming pool and 24-hour security .

On 26 December 2001, Rowling married Dr. Neil Murray, an anaesthetist, in a private ceremony at her home in the Perthshire village of Aberfeldy . Their son David was born shortly after Rowling began writing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Rowling took a break from working on the novel to care for him in his early infancy . Rowling's youngest child, Mackenzie Jean Rowling Murray, was born in January of 2005 .

Charity

All proceeds from the sales of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages go to the UK Comic Relief charity.

Rowling has contributed money and support to many other charitable causes, especially research and treatment of multiple sclerosis, from which her mother died in 1990. This death heavily affected her writing, according to Rowling.

In January 2006, Rowling went to Bucharest to raise funds for the Children's High Level Group, an organization devoted to enforcing the human rights of children, particularly in eastern Europe.

Television

Rowling made a guest appearance as herself on the American cartoon show The Simpsons, in a special British-themed episode entitled "The Regina Monologues". Producer Russell T. Davies asked Rowling to pen an episode of the upcoming season of Doctor Who; though Rowling was "amused by the suggestion, but simply have the time" . In a July 2005 interview with the MuggleNet and Leaky Cauldron websites' managers, Rowling revealed that she is a great admirer of Aaron Sorkin's work on the American TV show The West Wing.

Lawsuits

Rowling has been involved in several lawsuits over the Harry Potter series.

Nancy Stouffer

In the late 1990s Nancy Stouffer, an author of children's books published in the 1980s, began to charge publicly that Rowling's books were based on her books, including The Legend of Rah and the Muggles and Larry Potter and His Best Friend Lilly. Stouffer sued Rowling and Scholastic, Inc. in U.S. District Court, also naming Time Warner as a party. Rowling, Scholastic and Warner Bros. sued Stouffer in New York, asking the court to judge that there was no infringement of Stouffer's trademark