J. K. Rowling

Life

Joanne Rowling was born on July 31, 1965, in Yate, Gloucestershire, the elder daughter of a Royal Navy veteran turned engineer and a science technician. She wrote her first stories as a child. She studied French and classics at the University of Exeter, including a year in Paris, and graduated in 1987. By her account, the idea for Harry Potter arrived in 1990, and the next seven years brought the death of her mother, a move to Porto to teach English, marriage, the birth of her daughter, divorce, and a return to Britain. In late 1993 she arrived in Edinburgh with a draft in her suitcase, and she finished the first novel while living on state benefits.

After the books made her one of the wealthiest writers in the world (Forbes called her "the first billion-dollar author" in 2004), she became a major philanthropist. She founded the Volant Charitable Trust in 2000 and co-founded the children's charity Lumos in 2005, and Forbes has estimated her charitable giving from 2005 to 2025 at more than $250 million. She was appointed OBE in 2000 and later a Companion of Honour. She lives in Edinburgh.

Since 2019 Rowling has also become known for her public statements on sex and gender identity. She has opposed gender self-identification and argued that single-sex spaces such as women's changing rooms should be based on biological sex, positions she frames as defending women's rights while saying transgender people should live in "peace and security." Critics, including LGBT charities, fan sites and some actors from the films, have described her views as trans-exclusionary. She financially supported the campaign group For Women Scotland in its case before the UK Supreme Court.

Work

Twelve publishers turned down the first manuscript. Barry Cunningham at Bloomsbury bought it after the chairman's eight-year-old daughter read a chapter and demanded more, and on June 26, 1997, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone appeared in a first printing of 5,650 copies. Bloomsbury asked her to use initials to avoid deterring boy readers; she added K, for her grandmother Kathleen. Harry Potter follows an orphan raised in a cupboard who learns on his eleventh birthday that he is a wizard, and tracks his seven years at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry against the return of the dark wizard Voldemort, a clear Dark Lord in a chosen-one story. Its genius lay in the setting: a hidden magical Britain folded inside the ordinary one, with its own school houses, sport, bureaucracy and shops, an urban fantasy built from the traditions of the British boarding-school story.

The next books arrived in quick succession, and by Order of the Phoenix (2003) each release was a global midnight event; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007) closed the series. She later wrote the screenplays for the Fantastic Beasts films, co-created the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016), which won the Olivier Award for Best New Play, and writes the Cormoran Strike detective novels as Robert Galbraith.

Legacy

Harry Potter is the best-selling book series in history, with more than 600 million copies sold, and it revived Children's & YA Fantasy as a commercial force alongside Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Warner Bros.' eight films (2001–11) became one of the highest-grossing series in Fantasy Film. The franchise was a gaming fixture from the start, with Electronic Arts releasing adaptations alongside the films. Hogwarts Legacy (2023), an open-world action RPG from Avalanche Software set a century before the novels, let players attend Hogwarts as their own student; Rowling was not directly involved in its development. Despite calls for a boycott over her views, it sold more than 12 million copies in its first two weeks and 22 million by the end of 2023.

The story is now returning to screens. HBO's Harry Potter series, with Rowling as an executive producer and a season planned for each book, is scheduled to premiere on December 25, 2026, and was renewed for a second season in May 2026. Whatever the debates around its author, for millions of readers and players Hogwarts remains the first imagined world they ever entered, as The Hobbit's Middle-earth had been for an earlier generation.