Anitha Bennett

“All I ever wanted was for somebody to publish Harry so I could go to bookshops and see it.” — J.K.Rowling

Reportedly richer than the queen of England, J.K. Rowling — author of the best-selling Harry Potter fantasy series which have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide — has a remarkable rags-to-riches personal story to tell of her transformation from a single mother living on £70 a week on welfare into one of the world’s most famous and wealthiest woman authors with a net worth of £820 million (Rs.8,420 crore).

Rowling was born on July 31, 1965 in Chipping Sodury, UK. From early age, she nurtured an ambition to become a writer, although little came of her early literary efforts.

Rowling finished school and was encouraged by her parents to study French at the University of Exeter. She wanted to choose English, but complied with her parents’ wishes who felt that French would be “more useful” to her.

After a year in Paris, Rowling graduated from Exeter and took various jobs in London. It was in 1990, that Rowling first conceived the idea of Harry Potter. “When I was traveling back to London by myself on a crowded train, the idea for Harry Potter simply fell into my head. To my immense frustration, I didn’t have a functioning pen with me, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one. I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, and all the details bubbled up in my brain. The scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn’t know he was a wizard became more and more real to me. I think that perhaps if I had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them. I began to write Philosopher’s Stone that very evening!” she recalls.

But her book took a backseat in the December of 1990 when Rowling lost her mother to multiple sclerosis. She felt the loss deeply and mourned her for several days.

In 1991, Rowling left England to become an English teacher in Portugal. It was here that she met her first husband, and together they had a daughter Jessica.

However, after a couple of years, the couple split and Rowling was on her own again. She returned to England in 1994, to continue her first book. She was working full time, raising her daughter as a single parent and trying to finish her first book.

Eventually, she finished her first manuscript of Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, and sent it to several literary agents who typically rejected it. Then out of the blue, she got a message from Bloomsbury editor Barry Cunningham that the publishing house had decided to print her book and pay her an advance of £1,500 (Rs.1.5 lakh). His eight-year-old daughter had “loved the book’s first chapter”.

Within a few weeks of publication in 1996, sales took off. Then, Scholastic, an American company agreed to pay £100,000 for the rights to publish her first book in the US. And that started Rowling’s ride to fame and wealth.

In 1998, Warner Bros secured the film rights for all her books. The films have magnified the success of the books, turning Harry Potter into one of the most loved cult heroes of the 21st century. Under the close guidance of Rowling, the films have stayed close to the original plot; also at her request all actors are British.

Rowling continues to write and hopes to churn out more books for children. She currently lives in Scotland, on the banks of the river Tay, with her husband Neil Murray and three children.

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