#My story books series
However, I’ve continued to write the Cormoran Strike series under this name.
‘Robert Galbraith’ was subsequently revealed to be my crime writing pseudonym. I also started writing crime fiction, which I’d always wanted to try, and in 2013 I managed to publish a crime novel under another name, without anybody knowing it was me. The Casual Vacancy was published in 2012 and adapted for television in 2015. I also wrote three short “Hogwarts Library” companion books for charity: Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in aid of Comic Relief, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard in aid of Lumos.Īfter finishing the series, I decided to have a change from writing children’s books and wrote a novel for grown-ups instead, set in the real world. The books have now been translated into more than 80 different languages including Latin, Hebrew and Welsh, and recorded as audiobooks in nearly as many languages. By the time I finished writing the final, seventh book in the series in 2007 in the Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh, I had been living with Harry for seventeen years. The next six books of the Harry Potter series took me nearly another 10 years to write and publish, with the movies based on the books released in between publications. It was at this point that my life changed for ever and the books took off in a big way. The book was published in the US a year later, in August 1998, with a slightly different title (again at the publisher’s request), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I added it and used the initials at the publisher’s request, as they said it would make the books more appealing to boys. The “K” stands for Kathleen, my paternal grandmothers name. Then in June 1997 Bloomsbury published Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone under the name J.K. It took a year for my agent Christopher Little to find a publisher. It was honestly the best letter I had ever received in my life.
#My story books full
Having finished the full manuscript, I sent the first three chapters to a number of literary agents, one of whom wrote back asking to see the rest of it. There I trained and taught as a French teacher but continued to write in every spare moment I had, mostly in cafés around the city, whilst Jessica slept in her pram. The marriage didn’t work out and I moved with Jessica and the first three chapters of Harry Potter in a suitcase, to Edinburgh in Scotland, where my sister lived. Within that time, my mother had died, I had moved to Portugal to teach English, got married, and had my first daughter Jessica. It took me five years to write the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Rowlingįrom the start I knew there would be seven books and I had the whole story plotted out early on. I simply knew it was something I would love to write, but that day I was pen-less for once in my life, so as I sat there on the train, I had to rely on imagining the details, most of which ended up being in the books.
Harry Potter and Hogwarts came out of nowhere in the most physical rush of excitement, and ideas came teeming into my head. I studied French and Classics at University and spent a year in Paris as part of my course.Ī few years later in 1990, after moving to London, I was sitting on a delayed train back home from Manchester when suddenly I had the idea of a boy wizard who went to wizarding school. I grew up in a small village on the English/Welsh border and wrote my first story when I was six years old about a rabbit called “Rabbit” and when I was eleven, I wrote my first “novel” about seven cursed diamonds and the people who owned them. For as long as I can remember I wanted to be an author, and I am at my happiest alone in my writing room making things up.