Joanne Rowling was born in South Gloucestershire, England on 31 July 1965, on the outskirts of Bristol. Her sister Dianne was born at their home, when Rowling was almost two. The family moved to Winterbourne, Bristol when Rowling was four where she attended St Michael's Primary School, later moving to Tutshill, near Chepstow, Wales at the age of nine. She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College. In December 1990, Rowling's mother succumbed to a 10 year long battle with multiple sclerosis. "I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter.”

Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While there, she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes on 16 October 1992.They had one child, Jessica, and later, they divorced in 1993 after a fight in which Jorge threw her out of the house. In 1995, Rowling completed her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on an old manual typewriter. Upon the enthusiastic response of Bryony Evans, a reader who had been asked to review the book's first three chapters, the Fulham-based Christopher Little Literary Agents agreed to represent Rowling in her quest for a publisher. The book was handed to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected it. A year later she was finally given the green light (and a £1500 advance) by the editor Barry Cunningham from the small publisher Bloomsbury. The decision to take Rowling on was apparently largely down to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of the company's chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father and immediately demanded the next.

In December, 1999, the third Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the Smarties Prize, in the process making Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth Harry Potter novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance. In January, 2000, Prisoner of Azkaban won the inaugural Whitbread Children's Book of the Year award, though it narrowly lost the Book of the Year prize to Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. That June, the Queen honored Rowling by making her an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

To date, six of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter series, one for each of Harry's school years, have already been published and all have broken sales records. The last three volumes in the series have all been the fastest-selling books in history, grossing more in their opening 24 hours than blockbuster films. Book 6 of her series earned The Guinness World Records Award for being the fastest selling book ever. The sixth book of the series sold more copies in 24 hours than "The Da Vinci Code" sold in 1 year. This was the best-selling book of the previous year.

In June 2006, the British public named Rowling "the greatest living British writer." We hope that in the future, she will continue to demonstrate her talents through another series of books.


~Jadis McKinnen.