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After university, she worked as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International. She then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language.

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14y ago
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11y ago

Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling (née Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16 km) northeast of Bristol.[23] Her mother Anne was half-French, half-Scottish. Her mother's maternal grandfather, Dr. Dugald Campbell, was born in Lamlash on the Isle of Arran.[24] Her mother's paternal grandfather, Louis Volant, was awarded the Croix de Guerre for exceptional bravery in defending the village of Courcelles-le-Comte during the First World War.[25]

Rowling's sister Dianne[9] was born at their home when Rowling was 23 months old.[23] The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four.[26] She attended St Michael's Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce and education reformer Hannah More.[27][28] Her headmaster at St Michael's, Alfred Dunn, has been suggested as the inspiration for the Harry Potter headmaster Albus Dumbledore.[29]

As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would usually then read to her sister. She recalls that "I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called Rabbit. He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee."[16] At the age of nine, Rowling moved to Church Cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Tutshill, close to Chepstow, Wales.[23] When she was a young teenager, her great aunt, who Rowling said "taught classics and approved of a thirst for knowledge, even of a questionable kind", gave her a very old copy of Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels.[30] Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.[31]

She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother, Anne, had worked as a technician in the Science Department.[32] Rowling said of her adolescence, "Hermione [A bookish, know-it-all Harry Potter character] is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of."[33] Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books. "Ron Weasley [Harry Potter's best friend] isn't a living portrait of Sean, but he really is very Sean-ish."[34] Of her musical tastes of the time, she said "My favourite group in the world is The Smiths. And when I was going through a punky phase, it was The Clash."[35] Rowling studied A Levels in English, French and German[36] before reading for a BA in French and Classics at the University of Exeter, which she says was a "bit of a shock" as she "was expecting to be amongst lots of similar people -- thinking radical thoughts." Once she made friends with "some like-minded people" she says she began to enjoy herself.[37] After a year of study in Paris, Rowling moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.[38]

After working at Amnesty International in London, Rowling and her then-boyfriend decided to move to Manchester.[23] In 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into her mind.[39] She told The Boston Globe that "I really don't know where the idea came from. It started with Harry, then all these characters and situations came flooding into my head."[23][39] When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began to write immediately.[23][40]

In December of that year, Rowling's mother died, after ten years suffering from multiple sclerosis.[23] Rowling commented, "I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter."[21] Rowling said this death heavily affected her writing[21][41] and that she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.[42]

Rowling then moved to Porto in Portugal to teach English as a foreign language.[9][31] While there, on 16 October 1992, she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes. Their child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford), was born on 27 July 1993 in Portugal.[43] They separated in November 1993.[43][44] In December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near Rowling's sister in Edinburgh, Scotland.[23]

Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling saw herself as "the biggest failure I knew."[45] Her marriage had failed, she was jobless with a dependent child, but she described her failure as liberating:Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. -- J. K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address, 2008.[45]

In order to teach in Scotland she would need a postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE), requiring a full-time, year-long course of study. She began this course in August 1995,[46] after completing her first novel while having survived on social security.[47] She wrote in many cafés, especially Nicolson's Café,[48] wherever she could get Jessica to fall asleep.[23][49] In a 2001 BBC interview, Rowling denied the rumour that she wrote in local cafés to escape from her unheated flat, remarking, "I am not stupid enough to rent an unheated flat in Edinburgh in midwinter. It had heating." Instead, as she stated on the American TV programme A&E Biography, one of the reasons she wrote in cafés was because taking her baby out for a walk was the best way to make her fall asleep

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11y ago

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Actually Rowling wrote many things for twenty years before writing Harry Potter - but nothing that was ever published. Whens he was six, she wrote a story about a rabbit called Rabbit. At nine or ten she wrote a story about seven cursed diamonds. In her twenties she made two starts at adult novels, but she did not finish them because she realised they were very bad.

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12y ago

J.K. Rowling was a research assistant at Amnesty International. She also taught French in Scotland and English in Portugal.

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14y ago

She was an English teacher

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13y ago

She's a author.

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Mina Lee

Lvl 2
4y ago

she is a hacker

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Q: Did she write anything before Harry Potter?
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What she writing before Harry Potter Series?

J.K. Rowling did not write anything before the Harry Potter series. She would occasionally write short stories that she shared with family and friends but she didn't have any published works until Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Actually she got the idea to write Harry Potter one day when the train she was on had a four-hour delay.


Did J.K. Rowling write the first Harry Potter on napkins?

No, J.K. Rowling did not write the first Harry Potter book on napkins. She wrote the manuscript for "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" in a series of notebooks while sitting in cafes in Edinburgh, Scotland.


Will there be an Albus Potter book?

J.K. Rowling (author of the Harry Potter series) has stated that she may or may not write more books about Harry Potter or his offspring. Since then, she has not stated anything else.


Will there be more Harry Potter books?

No. She will not write anymore Harry Potter book after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.


Are there any concrete plan for the author of the Harry Potter series to write more now that the final Harry Potter movie has been released?

J.K. Rowling has stated numerous times that she will not write another Harry Potter book. She is working on other projects which she states will not have anything to do with fantasy as she doesn't want to borrow too much from Harry Potter.


Why did she write Harry Potter books?

she has writen Harry Potter books because they are interesting


How do you address a letter to Harry Potter?

Harry Potter is a fictional character, you cannot write to him.


Is J.K Rowling writing a prequel to Harry Potter?

No. She said she's likely not going to write anything else Harry Potter related except perhaps an encyclopedia. She didn't rule it out entirely though.


Will JK Rowling ever write anything unrelated to Harry Potter?

Yes she is working on some things just now.


What Harry Potter seesor feels when he is in the library in Harry Potter and philosopher'sstone?

You can find the answer on a website called Fanfiction. There are fic where people write about Harry Potter reading Harry Potter and The philosopher's stone and so on...


Did Agatha Christie write the Harry Potter book?

No, JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter series.


Did J.K. Rowling write Harry Potter?

Yes. Her name is on each of the Harry Potter books as the author.