The Writer
J.K. Rowling is one of the world’s best-known living writers, as the author of the enduringly popular, era-defining Harry Potter book series, the bestselling ‘Strike’ crime fiction series written under the pen name Robert Galbraith and several stand-alone novels for adults and children.
After the idea for Harry Potter came to her on a delayed train journey in 1990, she plotted out and started writing the series of seven books and the first, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published in the UK in 1997. The series took another ten years to complete, concluding in 2007 with the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
The Harry Potter books have now sold over 600 million copies in 85 languages, been listened to as audiobooks for two billion hours and made into eight smash hit movies, released between 2001 and 2011. They continue to be discovered and loved by new generations of readers, with new full-cast versions of the audiobooks having been recently published and a television adaptation series now in production with HBO Max, due to start airing in December 2026.
To accompany the book series, J.K. Rowling wrote three short companion volumes for charity: Quidditch Through the Ages, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and The Tales of Beedle the Bard, in aid of her international children’s charity Lumos.
In 2012, J.K. Rowling’s digital platform Pottermore was launched to provide a deeper experience for readers, with its successor HarryPotter.com now the official digital home of the Harry Potter franchise. Pottermore Publishing is the global digital publisher of the Harry Potter series as well as other digital audiobooks and eBooks from Harry Potter™.
Harry’s story as a parent himself was continued in a stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which J.K. Rowling wrote with playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany. It opened in London in 2016 and is now playing in locations around the world.
Also in 2016, J.K. Rowling made her screenwriting debut with the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. This was the first in a series of adventures featuring Magizoologist Newt Scamander and set before the time of Harry Potter. The second film, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, was released in 2018 and the third, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore was released in 2022. The screenplays were published to coincide with each film release.
In 2020, J.K. Rowling published a fairy tale for younger children, The Ickabog, which was initially serialised for free online during the Covid-19 pandemic, and then published as a book illustrated by children, with author royalties donated to her charitable trust, Volant, to benefit charities helping to alleviate social deprivation and assist vulnerable groups, particularly women and children.
J.K. Rowling’s children’s novel The Christmas Pig, an adventure story about a boy’s love for his most treasured toy and how far he will go to find it, was published in 2021 and has been a bestseller in the UK, USA and Europe.
Her novels for adults include The Casual Vacancy, which was published in 2012, has been translated into 44 languages and adapted for television by the BBC in 2015.
Writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, she is also the author of the highly acclaimed Strike crime fiction series featuring private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. The first of these, The Cuckoo’s Calling, was published in 2013, at first without its author’s true identity being known. The Silkworm followed in 2014, Career of Evil in 2015, Lethal White in 2018, Troubled Blood in 2020, The Ink Black Heart in 2022, The Running Grave in 2023 and The Hallmarked Man in 2025. All were published to critical acclaim and were bestsellers in the UK and internationally. The books are adapted for television by the BBC and HBO.
Her powerful, deeply affecting Harvard Commencement speech she gave in 2008 was published in 2015 as a book, Very Good Lives, sold in aid of Lumos and university–wide financial aid at Harvard.
J.K. Rowling says she is at her happiest in her writing room, in front of her laptop, making up stories. Here she talks openly and in-depth about her writing process, providing a personal insight into her writing world.
Photography Debra Hurford Brown © J.K. Rowling
The Campaigner and Philanthropist
J.K. Rowling is also a campaigner and philanthropist. Since 2000, she has supported a wide range of humanitarian causes through her charitable trust, Volant, including charities in Scotland helping vulnerable groups, particularly women and children, born out of her own personal experience having famously created Harry Potter while living on state benefits as a single parent, remembering only too well what it’s like to live in poverty.
Throughout her public life over the last 25 years, J.K. Rowling has chosen to use her platform to champion causes that have a personal meaning and resonate with her including: supporting single parents as President of Gingerbread; the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic, a world-leading research and treatment centre for Multiple Sclerosis and other degenerative neurological conditions in Edinburgh, founded in 2013 in the name of her mother who died from the disease; the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum Better Together campaign and in 2016 she was a vocal opponent of Brexit, campaigning for the UK to remain in the EU .
J.K. Rowling has not only donated large amounts to existing charities and causes but has provided the funds and has personally been involved in setting up organisations where she has identified a particular need.
Compelled by an article in the Sunday Times newspaper in 2004 about children being kept in caged beds in an Eastern European institution, J.K. Rowling had the idea for an organisation which would seek to end the institutionalisation of children. And so the Lumos Foundation, named after the light-giving spell in Harry Potter, was founded in 2005, an international children’s charity fighting for every child’s right to a family by transforming care systems around the world, and where possible safely reuniting families. In its first 20 years, it has enabled more than 280,000 children around the world to thrive in safe and loving families and not in institutions.
In 2022, she founded a women’s sexual assault support centre, Beira’s Place, in Edinburgh and in 2024 set up The J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund offering legal funding support to individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s and girls’ sex-based rights in all aspects of life.
In 2020 she wrote a deeply personal essay on her reasons for speaking out on sex and gender issues, voicing her concerns about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights; the importance of safeguarding children and the protection of freedom of speech. Despite the intimidating backlash, she continues to be vocal on these issues, particularly on her personal social media channel X, emboldened by the extraordinary messages of support she receives from a cross section of people, who are unable to speak out themselves.
Early Life
Joanne Rowling was born on 31st July 1965 at Yate General Hospital near Bristol and she and her younger sister grew up in Gloucestershire in England and in Chepstow, Gwent, in south-east Wales.
Her father, Peter, was an aircraft engineer at the Rolls Royce factory in Bristol and her mother, Anne, was a science technician in the Chemistry department at Wyedean Comprehensive, which Jo also attended. Anne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when Jo was a teenager and died in 1990, before the Harry Potter books were published.
The young Jo grew up surrounded by books. “I lived for books,’’ she has said. “I was your basic common-or-garden bookworm, complete with freckles and National Health spectacles.”
She wanted to be a writer from an early age and wrote her first book at the age of six – a story about a rabbit, called ‘Rabbit’. At just eleven, she wrote her first novel – about seven cursed diamonds and the people who owned them.
Jo studied at Exeter University, where she read so widely outside her French and Classics syllabus that she clocked up a fine of £50 for overdue books at the University library. Her knowledge of Classics would one day come in handy for creating the spells in the Harry Potter series, some of which are based on Latin.
Her course included a year in Paris. “I lived in Paris for a year as a student,” Jo tweeted after the 2015 terrorist attacks there. “It’s one of my favourite places on earth.”
After her degree, she moved to London and worked in a series of jobs, including one as a researcher at Amnesty International. “There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them.” She said later. “My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.”
Over the next five years, she began to map out all seven books of the Harry Potter series. She wrote mostly in longhand and gradually built up a mass of notes, many of which were scribbled on odd scraps of paper.
Taking her notes with her, she moved to northern Portugal to teach English as a foreign language, married Jorge Arantes in 1992 and had a daughter, Jessica, in 1993. When the marriage ended later that year, she returned to the UK to live in Edinburgh, with Jessica and a suitcase containing the first three chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
In Edinburgh, Jo trained as a teacher and began teaching in the city’s schools, but she continued to write in every spare moment.
Having completed the full manuscript, she sent the first three chapters to a number of literary agents, one of whom wrote back asking to see the rest of it. She says it was “the best letter I had ever received in my life.”
The book was first published in the UK by Bloomsbury Children’s Books in June 1997, under the name J.K. Rowling. It was subsequently published by Scholastic in the US the following year, under the title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, with the title change suggested by her publisher.
The “K” stands for Kathleen, her paternal grandmother’s name. The initial K was added at her publisher’s request, who thought a book by an obviously female author might not appeal to the target audience of young boys.
J.K. Rowling married Dr Neil Murray in 2001 and they have two children.
Honours & Awards
As well as receiving an OBE and Companion of Honour for services to children’s literature, J.K. Rowling has received many other awards and honours, including France’s Legion d’Honneur, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award, Denmark’s Hans Christian Andersen Award and a Blue Peter Gold Badge.
In 2016 she was the recipient of the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award for her advocacy of free expression and for women’s and girls’ rights.
