J.K Rowling

Personal life

Joanne Kathleen Rowling was born on the 31 of July 1965 in Yate, which is located in Gloucestershire. When she was two years old she moved to Winterbourne. When she was a young girl she wrote fantasy stories that she read to her sister. Her teenage years weren't great since her mother was ill and she had a bad relationship with her father. In 1986 she graduated from the University of Exeter and moved to London to start working, where she wrote a famous essay named "What was the Name of that Nymph Again? or Greek and Roman Studies Recalled".

When she was teaching English in Portugal she met a man named Jorge Arantes in a bar. They got married on the 16th October 1992. They had a child Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes, and after only one year they moved apart. She Then moved to Scotland with her daughter so they could live closer to Rowling's sister. Rowling saw herself as a failure because she had failed a marriage and she had no job, She was also diagnosed with clinical depression and contemplated suicide.

When her ex-husband came looking for her she got a restraining order and filed a divorce in august 1994. On the 26 of December 2001 she married a Scottish doctor called Neil Murray. Their son was born on the 24th of March 2003. She stopped writing on the current Harry Potter book to tend to her son's needs. Her youngest child, Mackenzie Jean Rowling Murray was born on the 23rd January 2005.

J.K. Rowling is now the president of the charity Gingerbread which helps one parent families. Rowling also wrote two booklets for a charity the booklets were taken from the Hogwarts library. The booklets helped to raise15.7 million pounds. She also sold one of her handwritten copies of ''The Tales of Beedle the Bard'' for 1.95 million pounds on Amazon, it is now the most expensive book sold by auction.

Harry Potter books

She started considering making Harry Potter when she was sitting in a delayed train. When she was writing the first harry potter book her mother died. This affected her writing and made Harry Potter also have the same feeling of loss. In 1995 she had finished the book

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone but the book was rejected by twelve publishing. In 1996 she finally had her book released and one year later 1000 copies were made, 500 of them were sent to libraries, these copies are now worth 16000-25000£, a publishing company in USA had in early 1998 bought the licences to the book for 105 000$. With this cash she moved to Edinburgh. Her first three Harry potter book won the Nestlé smarties book prize making her the first person to win the price three times in a row. The fourth book sold 370 000 copies in the first day in Great Britain and three million copies in the first two days in USA, which broke many records. There was a three-year-wait for the fifth book and the media speculated that she was running out of ideas. The sixth book once again broke all previous sales records and sold nine million copies of itself and so did the seventh book with eleven million copies sold. Harry Potter is now worth about 15 billion dollars.

The Movies

In 1998 Warner Bros bought the licenses to harry potter and the first movie was released in 2001 and the second movie in 2002 and so on. A new movie was released almost every year. J.K.Rowling had certain demands about the movie, such as it being filmed in Britain with an all British cast. All movies except for the 5th movie were scripted by Steven Kloves and Rowling. She also worked as a producer on the last two movies. In 2016 one of her new series ''Fantastic beasts where to find them which'' which is set in 1920s NY.

Text: Rikard Fors and Mattias Linman

Sources:

J.K. Rowling (homepage)

Wikipedia, information about J.K. Rowling