more photos (8)

J.K. Rowling’s Followers (234,621)

Add New
Videos

8 comments

'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them' Full Trailer

5 comments

J.K. Rowling

Born

in Yate, South Gloucestershire, England, The United Kingdom

July 31, 1965

Website

http://www.jkrowling.com

Twitter

jk_rowling

Genre

Fiction, Young Adult, Fantasy

Influences

Jane Austen, Geoffrey Chaucer, Oscar Wilde, C.S. Lewis ...more

edit data

See also: Robert Galbraith
Although she writes under the pen name J.K. Rowling, pronounced like rolling, her name when her first Harry Potter book was published was simply Joanne Rowling. Anticipating that the target audience of young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman, her publishers demanded that she use two initials, rather than her full name. As she had no middle name, she chose K as the second initial of her pen name, from her paternal grandmother Kathleen Ada Bulgen Rowling. She calls herself Jo and has said, "No one ever called me 'Joanne' when I was young, unless they were angry." Following her marriage, she has sometimes used the name Joanne Murray when conducting personal business. During the Leveson Inquiry she See also: Robert Galbraith
Although she writes under the pen name J.K. Rowling, pronounced like rolling, her name when her first Harry Potter book was published was simply Joanne Rowling. Anticipating that the target audience of young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman, her publishers demanded that she use two initials, rather than her full name. As she had no middle name, she chose K as the second initial of her pen name, from her paternal grandmother Kathleen Ada Bulgen Rowling. She calls herself Jo and has said, "No one ever called me 'Joanne' when I was young, unless they were angry." Following her marriage, she has sometimes used the name Joanne Murray when conducting personal business. During the Leveson Inquiry she gave evidence under the name of Joanne Kathleen Rowling. In a 2012 interview, Rowling noted that she no longer cared that people pronounced her name incorrectly.

Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling, a Rolls-Royce aircraft engineer, and Anne Rowling (née Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16 km) northeast of Bristol. Her mother Anne was half-French and half-Scottish. Her parents first met on a train departing from King's Cross Station bound for Arbroath in 1964. They married on 14 March 1965. Her mother's maternal grandfather, Dugald Campbell, was born in Lamlash on the Isle of Arran. 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.

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

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." At the age of nine, Rowling moved to Church Cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Tutshill, close to Chepstow, Wales. 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. Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.

Rowling has said of her teenage years, in an interview with The New Yorker, "I wasn’t particularly happy. I think it’s a dreadful time of life." She had a difficult homelife; her mother was ill and she had a difficult relationship with her father (she is no longer on speaking terms with him). She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother had worked as a technician in the science department. 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." Steve Eddy, who taught Rowling English when she first arrived, remembers her as "not exceptional" but "one of a group of girls who were bright, and quite good at English." Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books. ...more

96 posts
J.K. Rowling's Blog

J.K. Rowling isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.

HBO announces writer and director for Harry Potter TV series

HBO, in association with Warner Bros. Television, has named Francesca Gardiner (HBO’s “Succession,” “Killing Eve”) as writer (showrunner) and executive producer and Mark Mylod (HBO’s “Succession,” “Game of Thrones” and “The Last of Us”) as executive producer and director of multiple episodes of the upcoming original Harry Potter series.

The series will be a faithful adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s H

Combine Editions
J.K. Rowling’s books

Average rating: 4.46 · 41,648,504 ratings · 997,785 reviews · 703 distinct works • Similar authors

	Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Harry Potter, #1) by J.K. Rowling, Olly Moss (Illustrator) 4.47 avg rating — 11,538,762 ratings — published 1997 — 1318 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3) 4.58 avg rating — 4,907,578 ratings — published 1999 — 929 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2) 4.43 avg rating — 4,549,699 ratings — published 1998 — 46 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4) by J.K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré (Illustrator) 4.57 avg rating — 4,244,563 ratings — published 2000 — 849 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7) by J.K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré (Illustrator) 4.62 avg rating — 4,148,086 ratings — published 2007 — 672 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5) by J.K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré (Illustrator) 4.50 avg rating — 3,836,570 ratings — published 2003 — 663 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6) by J.K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré (Illustrator) 4.58 avg rating — 3,693,417 ratings — published 2005 — 672 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One and Two (Harry Potter, #8) by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, John Tiffany 3.47 avg rating — 1,150,358 ratings — published 2016 — 10 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Tales of Beedle the Bard (Hogwarts Library, #3) 4.03 avg rating — 514,084 ratings — published 2008 — 276 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Harry Potter Series Box Set (Harry Potter, #1-7) 4.73 avg rating — 304,162 ratings — published 2007 — 230 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by J.K. Rowling…

Series by J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter (7 books)
by

J.K. Rowling,

Mary GrandPré (Illustrator)

4.49 avg rating — 38,099,646 ratings

Harry Potter Persian/Farsi Split-Volume Edition (12 books)
by

J.K. Rowling,

ویدا اسلامیه (ترجمه),

جی.کی. رولینگ

4.49 avg rating — 21,008,922 ratings

Fantastic Beasts: The Original Screenplay (5 books)
by

J.K. Rowling

4.11 avg rating — 228,081 ratings

Pottermore Presents (3 books)
by

J.K. Rowling

4.19 avg rating — 120,179 ratings

Harry Potter Korean Split-Volume Paperback (23 books)
by

J.K. Rowling,

조앤・K・롤링

4.30 avg rating — 47,941 ratings

More series by J.K. Rowling…

Related News

Kristin Hannah Writes an American Epic

When Kristin Hannah, the bestselling author of The Nightingale, began her new historical epic centered on the Dust Bowl and the Great...

Polls

Sometimes the first line of a book just grabs you by the nostrils and drags your fool head into its pages, preventing escape in any way, shape or form. Which of these opening lines has its phalanges most firmly planted in your nasal cavities?

"Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

611 votes, 6.1%

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini

529 votes, 5.3%

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

528 votes, 5.3%

"It was a pleasure to burn."

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

469 votes, 4.7%

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

444 votes, 4.5%

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

403 votes, 4.0%

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien

375 votes, 3.8%

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

355 votes, 3.6%

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

319 votes, 3.2%

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

295 votes, 3.0%

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

1984 by George Orwell

283 votes, 2.8%

"He— for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it— was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters."

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

267 votes, 2.7%

"All children, except one, grow up."

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

266 votes, 2.7%

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

246 votes, 2.5%

"All this happened, more or less."

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

240 votes, 2.4%

Bah! Foolish poll-maker-person! The nostril seizing power of these paltry lines is minimal, at best! Look to the comments section where I shall carefully type out my choice, which you have so imprudently omitted!

238 votes, 2.4%

"As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

232 votes, 2.3%

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

229 votes, 2.3%

“'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'”

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

222 votes, 2.2%

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

206 votes, 2.1%

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."

The Crow Road by Iain Banks

202 votes, 2.0%

"Mother died today."

The Stranger by Albert Camus

198 votes, 2.0%

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife."

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

198 votes, 2.0%

"Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women."

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

194 votes, 1.9%

"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person."

Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler

193 votes, 1.9%

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Neuromancer by William Gibson

156 votes, 1.6%

"I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man."

Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

151 votes, 1.5%

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

139 votes, 1.4%

"Call me Ishmael."

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

131 votes, 1.3%

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim and we sat in the Korova milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening."

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

129 votes, 1.3%

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."

The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton

122 votes, 1.2%

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

115 votes, 1.2%

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

Murphy by Samuel Beckett

114 votes, 1.1%

"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

114 votes, 1.1%

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

110 votes, 1.1%

“'When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,' Papa would say, 'she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.'”

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

110 votes, 1.1%

"For a long time, I went to bed early."

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

110 votes, 1.1%

"Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden."

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

94 votes, 0.9%

"Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation."

Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish

79 votes, 0.8%

"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

76 votes, 0.8%

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

61 votes, 0.6%

"I have never begun a novel with more misgiving."

The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

55 votes, 0.6%

"The moment one learns English, complications set in."

Chromos by Felipe Alfau

45 votes, 0.5%

"When I was three and Bailey was four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed - 'To Whom It May Concern' - that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson."

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

42 votes, 0.4%

"Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror."

Herbert West: Reanimator and Other Stories by H.P. Lovecraft

42 votes, 0.4%

"Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing."

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

41 votes, 0.4%

"My lady and I are being shut up in a tower for seven years"

Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale

41 votes, 0.4%

"'Barabbas came to us by sea', the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy."

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

37 votes, 0.4%

"What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?"

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino

36 votes, 0.4%

"Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature."

The Debut by Anita Brookner

36 votes, 0.4%

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu."

Waiting by Ha Jin

35 votes, 0.4%

9963 total votes

263 comments

More...

Topics Mentioning This Author

topics	posts	views	last activity
What's the Name o...: SOLVED. Mystery/thriller about an exclusive British Boys' School [s]	3	1252	Jun 13, 2007 03:12PM
The Book Challenge: Sarah's 2008 Book Challenge v2.0 - Fini!	5	1866	Dec 29, 2008 09:31AM
The Book Challenge: Elaine's Oct - Dec 2008 Book Challenge	13	213	Jan 01, 2009 09:33AM
75 Books...More o...: Authors you love	17	2309	Jan 27, 2009 04:14AM
Glens Falls (NY) ...: Jim's post about a Stephen King Interview...	4	111	Feb 10, 2009 11:19AM
Glens Falls (NY) ...: Mon. Feb. 9, 2009 - What are U doing today?	31	28	Feb 15, 2009 10:12PM

More…

Is this you? Let us know. If not, help out and invite J.K. to Goodreads.

J.K. Rowling’s Followers (234,621)

Add NewVideos

J.K. Rowling

96 postsJ.K. Rowling's Blog

HBO announces writer and director for Harry Potter TV series

Combine EditionsJ.K. Rowling’s books

Series by J.K. Rowling

Related News

Polls

Topics Mentioning This Author

Add New
Videos

96 posts
J.K. Rowling's Blog

Combine Editions
J.K. Rowling’s books