Joanne Rowling is an English writer, best known under her pen name J.K. Rowling and for creating Harry Potter, a seemingly ordinary boy who discovers that he is a wizard.
She was born in Yate, South Gloucestershire, on 31 July 1965.
After studying French and Classics at the University of Exeter , she moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International. During this period, while she was on a four-hour delayed-train trip between Manchester and London, she had the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry and began to write immediatelly.
Rowling then moved to Portugal to teach English. Once there, she found herself a man, married and gave birth to a daughter. Unfortunately, the marriage was not an untroubled one and she divorced from her husband and settled down in Edinburgh. Unemployed and living from the dole, she completed the first Harry Potter novel there.
Only then did the difficult part of her journey begin. The book was handed down from publisher to publisher until Bloomsbury decided to take it not before warning Rowling that she cannot make a living out of writing children's books. How wrong they were...
In June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher’s Stone with an initial print run of only one-thousand copies, five-hundred of which were distributed to libraries. Today, such copies are each valued at between £16,000 and £25,000.
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. The last three volumes in the series have been the fastest-selling books in history.
Joane Rowling's fortune today is estimated to be just over 1 billion dollars, making her the second richest female entertainer in the world. Moreover, she is the first person to become an US-dollar billionaire by writing books.
If you wish to know more, visit:
http://www.jkrowling.com/
and if you wish to read an interview with her, take a look at:
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/03/cov_31featureb.html
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