J. K. Rowling

J. K. Rowling is an English writer, writing under the pseudonym Joanne Kathleen Rowling, the author of the series of novels about Harry Potter (1997–2007), translated into more than 60 languages, including Russian.

She was born on 31 July 1965 in the small town of Yate, Gloucestershire, England (although at the beginning of her career she named another town — Chipping Sodbury, where she had never lived). According to the writer, the reason for such discrepancies in her biography was that Yate had always seemed to her a gloomy place, and her publishers and publicists supported her in this. Her sister, Dianne, was born two years later. Rowling loved telling stories from early childhood and wrote her first fairy tale when she was 5 or 6 years old — it was a tale about a rabbit named Rabbit, who had measles and was visited by friends with a giant bee named Miss Bee. As a child, she moved twice. Both times to towns near Bristol: first to Ait, then to Winterbourne. The family moved again when she was nine years old — to Tutshill. She attended primary school in Tutshill and secondary school in Wyedean.

At that time she was quiet, freckled, near-sighted, and terribly unathletic. Her favorite subjects were English and other languages. She would usually tell stories to her friends, in which they all performed bold and heroic feats that they would never have dared in real life.

She entered the University of Exeter straight after school and studied French, at her parents’ insistence, who said that she could make a career as a secretary with two languages. She spent several years on university studies and working as “the world’s worst secretary.”

In 1991, at the age of 26, she went to Portugal to teach English. She says she enjoyed it. She gave lessons in the afternoon and evening, and wrote in the mornings. During this time she began working on her third novel (the first two were abandoned as “very bad”). The new book was about a boy who discovered that he was a wizard and had entered a school of magic. In Portugal she met a Portuguese journalist and married him. Their daughter, Jessica, was born in 1993.