J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling's Backstory

Early life

Joanne Rowling was born on July 31, 1965, in Yate, England.⁸ She grew up in Gloucestershire and in Chepstow, Wales, reading constantly and writing stories from childhood.¹ Her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when Rowling was a teenager and died in 1990.¹ Rowling studied French and Classics at the University of Exeter, a course that included a year in Paris.¹

The idea on the train

After graduating, Rowling moved to London and worked in several jobs, among them researcher at Amnesty International.¹ The idea for Harry Potter came to her in 1990 on a delayed train journey,¹ which Biography.com reports was from Manchester to London.⁸ Over the following years she planned the seven-book series, writing mostly by hand.¹

Portugal and Edinburgh

Rowling moved to northern Portugal to teach English, married there in 1992 and had a daughter in 1993.¹ When the marriage ended she settled in Edinburgh, trained as a teacher and taught in the city’s schools while she wrote.¹ Biography.com reports that she was living on welfare while she worked on the first book.⁸

Harry Potter

Rowling sent the first three chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to literary agents; one asked to see the rest, which she later called “the best letter I had ever received in my life.”¹ Bloomsbury published the book in June 1997, and Scholastic published it in the United States in 1998 as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, a change of title its publisher suggested.¹ The series ended in 2007 with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.¹ The seven books have sold more than 600 million copies in 85 languages.²

Robert Galbraith and other work

Her first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, followed in 2012.¹ In 2013 she published The Cuckoo’s Calling as Robert Galbraith, at first without revealing that she was the author.¹ The Sunday Times connected the pen name to Rowling after noticing that “Galbraith” shared an agent, editor and publisher with her; Rowling said that being Galbraith had been “a liberating experience.”⁹

In 2016 she worked with the playwright Jack Thorne and the director John Tiffany on the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and made her debut as a screenwriter with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, followed by two more Fantastic Beasts films.² She has also written two books for younger children, The Ickabog (2020) and The Christmas Pig (2021).²

Charities

Rowling set up the Volant Charitable Trust in 2000 to fund charities, mainly in Scotland, that work against social deprivation, and founded the children’s charity Lumos in 2005.¹ She also supports the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic in Edinburgh, named for her mother; Beira’s Place, a support service for women who have experienced sexual violence, founded in 2022; and the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, set up in 2024 to fund legal cases on women’s sex-based rights.¹

Statements on sex and gender

In June 2020 Rowling published an essay of about 3,600 words in which, as the Thomson Reuters Foundation reported, she linked her own experiences of sexual assault and domestic abuse to her concern about transgender women’s access to women-only spaces.¹³ The head of the U.S. Human Rights Campaign and a UK trans rights group were among those who criticized it.¹³ In October 2026 she published a follow-up essay saying her views had not changed; her critics call those views anti-trans, a label she rejects.¹⁴