Joanne Kathleen Rowling was born on July 31, 1966 in Chipping Sodbury, a small town in England. She graduated from Exeter University, and then moved to Portugal to teach English, where she met and married a Portuguese journalist in 1990. In 1993, Joanne's only daughter, Jessica, was born, and shortly after she and her husband divorced. Joanne then moved to Edinburh with her daughter, to be near her sister Di.
The typical single mother, Joanne struggled to support Jessica and herself on welfare while working on the idea for a book (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone). Trying to sell the book, she got rejected a number of times before it was finally acccepted by a publisher.
The Harry Potter craze hit the world, and by the summer of 2000, the two next books in the series - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban were released. The books reached extrodinairy fame and earned approximately $480 million in the first three years. The world waited with bated breathe for the fourth book in the series (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), with advance orders totaling 1.8 million.
Now, Joanne is one of Britian's richest women. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire exceeded the amazing sucess of the first three books, and now a movie version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is being filmed.
Of her fame, Joanne is very flippant. 'People ask if I can walk down the street unmolested. Really easily. In Edinburgh it's really exceptional for people to come up to me. I'd say for the first two years of me being in the paper -- I didn't call myself famous. I didn't think of myself that way -- but for the first two years, I think I was in denial. i kept thinking it would go away. It will go away.' |
