J.K. Rowling

British · born 1965

Born Joanne Rowling on July 31, 1965, in Yate, Gloucestershire, to parents who had met on a train from King's Cross the previous year, she grew up in Winterbourne and later in a Tutshill cottage, a bookish child who wrote her first story, "Rabbit," at six. She read French and Classics at the University of Exeter, then worked as a secretary at Amnesty International in London. The idea for Harry Potter arrived on a delayed train from Manchester to King's Cross in 1990. The seven years that followed brought the death of her mother, the birth of her first child, divorce from her first husband, and a stretch of poverty on welfare in Edinburgh, where she wrote in cafes while her daughter slept beside her. Twelve publishers rejected the manuscript before Bloomsbury accepted it in 1996; the editor's eight-year-old daughter Alice demanded the next chapter the moment she finished the first. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone appeared in June 1997, and six sequels followed at intervals through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007, the series selling over six hundred million copies in eighty-four languages, the best-selling book series in publishing history. Bloomsbury had asked her to use initials, believing boys would not read a book by a woman; she chose K for her paternal grandmother Kathleen. Under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith she writes the Cormoran Strike crime novels. She was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 2001 and the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2017. She lives in Scotland with her second husband and three children.