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J. K. Rowling

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J.K. Rowling
File:JKRowling.jpg
BornJuly 31, 1965
Yate in South Gloucestershire, England
OccupationNovelist
GenreFantasy
Website
http://www.jkrowling.com

Joanne “Jo” Rowling, OBE (born July 31, 1965) is an English fiction writer who writes under the pen name J. K. Rowling. Rowling is most famously known as the 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 to become a US-dollar billionaire by writing books.

Early life

Joanne Rowling was born in Yate, South Gloucestershire, England on 31 July, 1965, 12 miles northeast of Bristol. Her sister Dianne was born at their home when Rowling was almost two years old. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne, Gloucestershire when Rowling was four, where she attended St Michael's Primary School, later moving to Tutshill, near Chepstow, South Wales at the age of nine. She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College. In December 1990, Rowling's mother succumbed to a 10-year-long battle with multiple sclerosis.

She had sex with a donkey

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. Rowling declared, in a recent interview, that she will most likely not use a new pen name as the press would quickly discover her true identity.

In 2006, Rowling revealed that she had 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.

She is not planning to write an eighth Harry Potter book, but has suggested she might publish an "encyclopedia" of the Harry Potter world consisting of all her unpublished material and notes. Any profits from such a book would be given to charity.

Charity

In 2001, the UK fundraiser Comic Relief asked three bestselling British authors (Rowling, lifestyle guru Delia Smith and Bridget Jones creator Helen Fielding) to submit booklets related to their most famous works for publication. For every pound raised, a pound would go towards combatting poverty and social inequality across the globe. Rowling's two booklets, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages, are ostensibly facsimiles of books found in the Hogwarts library, and are written under the names of their fictional authors, Newt Scamander and Kennilworthy Whisp. Since going on sale in March, 2001, the books have raised £15.7 million ($30 million) for the fund. The £10.8 million ($20 million) raised outside the UK has been channelled into a newly created International Fund for Children and Young People in Crisis. She has also personally given £22 million to Comic Relief.

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 2006, Rowling contributed a substantial sum toward the creation of a new Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Edinburgh. For reasons unknown, Scotland, Rowling's country of adoption, has the highest rate of MS in the world.

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.

On August 1st & 2nd, 2006, she read alongside Stephen King and John Irving at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Profits from the event were donated to the Haven Foundation, a charity that aids actors left uninsurable and unable to work, and the medical NGO Médecins Sans Frontières.

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 audience 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/), not a rhyme for "howling".

Current life and family

In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious 19th-century estate house, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Rowling also owns a home in Morningside, Edinburgh, and a Georgian house in London, on a street where, according to The Guardian, the average price of a house is £4.27 million ($8 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 Aberfeldy. Their son David Gordon Rowling Murray was born on March 3rd, 2003, shortly after Rowling began writing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 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, to whom she dedicated Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was born in January of 2005.

In her honour

The asteroid (43844) Rowling was named in her honour in early 2006, and the newly-discovered Pachycephalosaurid dinosaur Dracorex hogwartsia, currently at the Children's Museum in Indianapolis, was named in honour of her world in May 2006. There is a housing development in Bristol, near to her childhood home called Rowling Gate.

Television

Rowling made a guest appearance as herself on the American animated sitcom The Simpsons, in a special British-themed episode entitled The Regina Monologues. The amusing dialog consisted of a short conversation between Rowling and Lisa Simpson, who mispronounces Rowling's name:

Lisa: Look! It's J.K. Rowling, author of Harry Potter books! You've turned a generation of kids onto reading.
Rowling: Thank you, young Muggle.
Lisa: Can you tell me what happens at the end of the series?
Rowling: (sigh) He grows up and marries you.  (angrily) Is that what you want to hear?
Lisa: (dreamily) Yes!

Producer Russell T. Davies asked Rowling to pen an episode of the 2005 season of Doctor Who; 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.

In 2002, Rowling appeared on the BBC documentary "The Importance of Being Morrissey".

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 trademarks or copyright. Rowling and her co-litigants argued that much of the evidence that Stouffer presented was fraudulent, and asked for sanctions and attorneys' fees as punishment. In September 2002 the court found in Rowling's favour, stating that Stouffer had lied to the court and falsified and forged documents to support her case. Stouffer was fined US $50,000 and ordered to pay part (but not all) of the plaintiffs' costs. In January 2004 it was reported that Stouffer's appeal against the judgment had been rejected. The appeals court agreed that Stouffer's claims were properly dismissed because "no reasonable juror could find a likelihood of confusion as to the source of the two parties' works". A report of the judgment (requires subscription) can be found at Entertainment Law Digest. The 2002 judgment can be found here.

New York Daily News

On 19 June 2003 Rowling and her publisher Scholastic announced that they would sue the New York Daily News for $100 million because the newspaper had printed information on her work Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix before the book's official release date. The novel was due for release on Saturday 21 June, but the newspaper published a plot summary and short quotes on the previous Wednesday. An accompanying image even revealed two pages from the book with legible text. However, the story was complicated further when it was revealed that the paper had purchased the book from a health store whose owner received the novels wholesale and decided to place them in the window. The man claimed he was unaware he was supposed to wait until that Saturday.

The Bashu Publishing House, Chengdu

In 2003, unauthorized Chinese language "sequels" to the Harry Potter series, such as Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon, appeared for sale in the People's Republic of China. These books, written by ghostwriters, contain characters from the works of other authors, including Gandalf from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and the title character from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Rowling's lawyers successfully took legal action against the publishers, who were forced to pay damages.

Eksmo Publishers

Also in 2003, courts in the Netherlands prevented the distribution of a Dutch translation of Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass, the first of Dmitry Yemets' popular Russian series about a female apprentice wizard, Tanya Grotter. Rowling and her publishers sued, arguing that the Grotter books violate copyright law. Yemets and his original Moscow-based publishers, Eksmo, argued unsuccessfully that the books constitute a parody, permitted under copyright.

Bibliography

See also

  • Mary Grand Pre illustrator of the US editions of the Harry Potter series.

References

  1. The Harry Potter Lexicon, The Muggle Encyclopedia - Y. Accessed 17 March 2006.
  2. The Harry Potter Lexicon, The Harry Potter books. Accessed 19 March 2006.
  3. ContemporaryWriters.com. "J. K. Rowling". Accessed 23 March 2006.
  4. Watson, Julie and Kellner, Tomas. "J.K. Rowling And The Billion-Dollar Empire". Forbes.com, 26 February 2004. Accessed 19 March 2006.
  5. "J.K. Rowling and Stephen Fry interview". Radio 4, 10 December 2005. Accessed 21 March 2006.
  6. "J.K. Rowling on Finishing Harry Potter". 11 January 2006. Accessed 19 March 2006.
  7. JKR's site; no eighth book Accessed 10 April 2006.
  8. The Harry Potter Lexicon, Quidditch through the Ages. Accessed 19 March, 2006.
  9. Comic Relief books. Accessed 12 June 2006.
  10. Boshoff, Alison. "What does JK Rowling do with her money?". Daily Mail. Retrieved 24 August. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  11. J.K. Rowling's Official Site. "MS Society Scotland". Accessed 22 March 2006.
  12. Greig, Geordie. "There would be so much to tell her...". Tatler Magazine, 10 January 2006. Accessed 22 March 2006.
  13. In fact, on Richard and Judy, June 26,2006, she said that she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt. Transcript, Accessed 4 July 2006.
  14. MS Society, Scotland JK Rowling funds new MS centre. Edinburgh Research and Innovation, University of Edinburgh, 21 April 2006. Accessed 10 June 2006.
  15. J.K. Rowling's Official Site. "Launch of the Children's High Level Group". 25 January 2006. Accessed 22 March 2006.
  16. Yahoo Finance. Carrie, Harry and Garp. May 10 2006  Accessed 4 July 2006.
  17. Cite error: The named reference darkmark-bbc was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  18. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. "J.K. Rowling: CBC Interview #1". 26 October 2000. Accessed 19 March 2006.
  19. "The Not Especially Fascinating Life So Far of J. K. Rowling". Accessed 21 March 2006.
  20. ^ The Harry Potter Lexicon, The Muggle Encyclopedia - K. Accessed 21 March 2006.
  21. Collinson, Patrick. "Rub shoulders with Brucie for £4.3m, or Tony for £7,250". Guardian Unlimited, 26 April 2005. Accessed 21 March 2006.
  22. J.K. Rowling's Official Site. "Progress on Book Six". 15 March 2004. Accessed 22 March 2006.
  23. J.K. Rowling's Official Site. "JKR gives Birth to Baby Girl". 25 January 2005. Accessed 22 March 2006.
  24. "Citation for (43844)". Retrieved 2006-04-28.
  25. "Citation for Dracorex Hogwartsia". Retrieved 2006-06-08.
  26. Davies, Russell T. "J.K. Rowling asked to write an episode of Doctor Who". Doctor Who Magazine, Issue 343. 30 April 2004. Accessed 19 March 2006.
  27. Anelli, Melissa. "TLC Report: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince launch weekend, Edinburgh, Scotland, July 15 - July 17, 2005: Part Two". The Leaky Cauldron, 19 July 2005. Accessed 22 March 2006.
  28. BBC News. "Harry Potter books 'plagiarised'". 17 March 2000. Accessed 25 March 2006.
  29. Hogwarts Wire. "Stouffer ordered to pay 50k fine". 19 September 2002. Accessed 11 June 2006.
  30. Reuters. "Court throws out 'Muggles' claims against Rowling". Accessed 25 March 2006.
  31. The Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator. [http://www.hpana.com/news.17860.html "Nancy pay the costs of the appeal.
  32. "Rowling v. New York Daily News". Accessed 21 March 2006.
  33. August, Oliver and Malvern, Jack. "Harry Potter Wins an Easy Battle Against Chinese Pirates". The Times of London, 02 November 2002. Accessed 21 March 2006.
  34. "Rowling seeks 'Grotter' ban". BBC News, 13 March 2003. Accessed 21 March 2006.

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