| Joanne Rowling was born on 31st July 1965 in Yate near Bristol, though Jo would later claim to have been born in nearby Chipping Sodbury because the name sounded better. Her parents had met two years previously, aged eighteen, on a train pulling out of King's Cross station in London. They were heading to Arbroath, her father to join the Navy and her mother to join the WRENs. They married a year later. Two years after Jo was born her sister Dianne came along. When Jo was four years old the family moved a short distance to the town of Winterbourne. It was here that they were living on the same street as a family called Potter, which included a young brother and sister. The family would later claim that the children would play dress up with the Rowling girls, and that Harry was based on the boy, but Jo has said that neither is not true. During these years Jo would make up stories and plays that she and her sister would act out. She also wrote her first 'book' at the age of six about a rabbit who got the measles. Rabbit became a series of books which she illustrated herself. When Jo was nine her parents decided to follow through on a dream they'd had of living in the country, and relocated the family to Tutshill near Chepstow in Wales. Jo wasn't very fond of her new school. One of her teachers organised her class accourding to how smart she thought they were and put Jo in the 'stupid row'. When she started secondary school at age eleven Jo went to nearby Wyedean School and College. When Jo was fifteen her mother was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Although MS usually affects a person in episodes with months or even years in between, Jo's mother suffered from it almost continuously. It was when Jo went on to Wydean's Sixth Form College at sixteen that she met her friend Sean Harris, who was the first of her friends to pass his driving test and bought a turquoise Ford Anglia. He would pick her up in the bar whenever things with her mother were bad at home and they would just drive. The car meant freedom to Jo, which was why she later gave the car to the Weasleys. Jo left school in 1983 and went to University in Exeter, England, to study French and Classics (though her parents didn't know she was studying classics as they wouldn't have approved of a course that had no real usefulness). Then she moved to London where her longest term job was at Amnesty International. In 1990 she and her then boyfriend decided to move up north to Manchester and it was on her way back to London after a flat-hunting trip that Harry walked into her head fully formed. Many other ideas came to her on that journey too and she started writing Harry Potter as soon as she got home. Then, three months later, Jo's mother succumbed to the illness she had been battling with for ten years and died on 30th December. Jo and her family were devastated. The following year Jo decided she needed to get away and moved to Portugal to teach English as a foreign language, taking the work she had done on Harry Potter with her. It was here that she met her first husband, Jorge Arantes and had her first child Jessica (named after Jessica Mitford). Unfortunately the marriage didn't last very long and Jo returned to Britain in 1994 with a baby, three chapters and a collection of notes. She went to Edinburgh in Scotland because her sister Di was living there. A period of poverty followed in which Jo found it difficult to work because it was so hard to get child care. She suffered a period of clinical depression but got through it by a combination of looking after her daughter and writing her book, which she often wrote in cafés (though this was not, as the press would later write, to escape her unheated flat, which was not unheated at all - it was because her daughter was most likely to fall asleep if taken for a walk. Likewise it is not true that she wrote the Potter books on napkins because she couldn't afford paper). The manuscript was finished in 1995 and sent to two agents before it was accepted by The Christopher Little Agency. It was over a year before the book found a publisher but was eventually taken on by Bloomsbury. Rowling described the moment she found out it was going to be published as the second best moment of her life, next to the birth of her daughter. The rest of the books followed with ever increasing degrees of popularity, to the point that the series became a global phenomenon. Jo remarried in 2001 to Dr Neil Murray, which resulted in two more children - David, born in March 2003 and Mackenzie, born in January 2005. The family still lives in Edinburgh. Jo has been awarded honourary degrees by St Andrews University, the University of Edinburgh, Napier Univeristy, the University of Aberdeen and Harvard University. |