Joanne “Jo” Rowling, now famous as J.K. Rowling was born on July 31st 1965. Her claim to fame is the harry potter series she started in 1990. She is the true example of “rags to riches” because she started from living on welfare and became a multi- millionaire in the span of just five years. She is now the twelfth richest woman of United Kingdom. She was born in a small town 10 miles from Bristol. When she was four years old, her parents moved to Winterbourne and there she attended St. Michael’s primary school. Her headmaster at the school, Alfred Dunn, is said to be the inspiration for the headmaster at Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore. Rowling had loved story writing since she was just five or six. She recalls writing her first stories which were usually about animals and she read them to her sister, Dianne. After secondary school, she studied French and even went to Paris for a year. Then she came back to London to work as a bilingual secretary for Amnesty International. In 1990 once her train from Manchester to London was delayed for 4 hours. It was this magical moment in which the idea of a boy attending a school of wizardry first came to her mind and then all the characters and different situations just started to bombard her brain and when she reached her flat, she began writing immediately.
But before she could complete her book her mother died due to multiple sclerosis after struggling with the disease for ten years. This was a great emotional set back but she was able to put the same feeling of loneliness in Harry’s character in the first book. She moved to Portugal to teach English there and in 1992 she married a Portuguese television journalist there and had her first baby with him. Unfortunately her marriage ended in December and then she moved to Edinburgh and was there diagnosed with clinical depression. It was her worst time as she was jobless with a dependent child and diagnosed with depression. She even tried to commit suicide once. But she had the idea of Harry Potter. She would put her baby in a stroller and walk her around till she would fall asleep and then she would write her novel in a road side café.
In 1995 her manuscript was finally approved after receiving 12 rejections and the credit goes to an eight year old girl, Alice Newton who was given the first chapter to reviews by her father. She immediately demanded the next one. Alice was daughter of the chairman of Bloomsbury’s publications. Five months after its publication the book won its first Nestle Smarties book prize.
There was no looking back after that and Rowling continued to write the six more Harry potter books all of which broke all sales records. Then Harry Potter films soon followed and Rowling’s bank accounts expanded. She even produced the seventh Harry potter movie herself. She is now the twelfth richest British woman and has been voted as the most influential woman in Britain by leading magazine editors in 2010.
