J.K. Rowling

Early life

Joanne Rowling was born on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, to a middle-class family. Her parents Anne (née Volant) and Peter ("Pete") James Rowling had met the previous year on a train, sharing a trip from King's Cross station, London, to their naval postings at Arbroath, Scotland. Rowling's mother was with the Wrens and her father with the Royal Navy. Her mother was of Scottish and French ancestry. Pete Rowling was the son of a machine-tool setter who later opened a grocery shop. Pete and Anne married on 14 March 1965 and settled in Yate, where Pete started work as an assembly-line production worker and eventually worked his way into management as a chartered engineer. Anne Rowling later worked as a science technician. Neither of Rowling's parents attended university. Rowling is two years older than her sister, Dianne. When she was four, Rowling's family moved to Winterbourne, Gloucestershire. She began at St Michael's Church of England Primary School in Winterbourne when she was five. The Rowlings lived near a family called Potter – a name Rowling always liked. Rowling's mother liked to read and the family's homes were filled with books. Her father read The Wind in the Willows to his daughters, while her mother introduced them to the animals in Richard Scarry's books. Rowling's first attempt at writing, a story called "Rabbit" composed when she was six, was inspired by Scarry's creatures. When Rowling was about nine, the family purchased the historic Church Cottage in Tutshill. In 1974, Rowling began attending the nearby Church of England School. Biographer Sean Smith describes her teacher as a "battleaxe" who "struck fear into the hearts of the children"; Rowling's teacher seated her in "dunces' row" after she performed poorly on an arithmetic test. In 1975, Rowling joined a Brownies pack. Its special events and parties, and the pack groups (Fairies, Pixies, Sprites, Elves, Gnomes and Imps) provided a magical world away from her stern teacher. When she was eleven or twelve, she wrote a short story, "The Seven Cursed Diamonds". She later described herself during this period as "the epitome of a bookish child – short and squat, thick National Health glasses, living in a world of complete daydreams".

Sanctions & controversy

In the 1990s and 2000s, Rowling was both a plaintiff and defendant in lawsuits alleging copyright infringement. Nancy Stouffer sued Rowling in 1999, alleging that Harry Potter was based on stories she published in 1984. Rowling won in September 2002. Richard Posner describes Stouffer's suit as deeply flawed and notes that the court, finding Stouffer had used "forged and altered documents", assessed a $50,000 penalty against her. With her literary agents and Warner Bros., Rowling has brought legal action against publishers and writers of Harry Potter knockoffs in several countries. In mid-2000, Rowling and her publishers obtained a series of injunctions prohibiting sales or published reviews of her books before their official release dates. Beginning in 2001, after Rowling sold film rights to Warner Bros., the studio tried to take Harry Potter fan sites offline unless it determined that they were made by "authentic" fans for innocuous purposes. In 2007, with Warner Bros., Rowling started proceedings to cease publication of a book based on content from a fan site called The Harry Potter Lexicon. The court held that Lexicon was neither a fair use of Rowling's material nor a derivative work, but it did not prevent the book from being published in a different form. Lexicon was published in 2009.

Personal life

After university, Rowling moved to a flat in Clapham Junction with friends, and took a course to become a bilingual secretary. While she was working in temporary jobs in London, Amnesty International hired her to document human rights issues in French-speaking Africa. She began writing adult novels while working as a temp, although they were never published. In 1990, she planned to move with her boyfriend to Manchester, and frequently took long train trips to visit. In mid-1990, she was on a train delayed by four hours from Manchester to London, when the characters Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger came plainly into her mind. Having no pen or paper allowed her to fully explore the characters and their story in her imagination before she reached her flat and began to write. Rowling moved to Manchester around November 1990. She described her time in Manchester, where she worked for the Chamber of Commerce and at Manchester University in temp jobs, as a "year of misery". Her mother died of multiple sclerosis on 30 December 1990. At the time, Rowling was writing Harry Potter, and her mother's death heavily affected her writing. The pain of the loss of her mother was compounded when some personal effects her mother had left her were stolen. With the end of the relationship with her boyfriend, and "being made redundant from an office job in Manchester", Rowling moved to Porto, Portugal, in November 1991 to teach night classes in English as a foreign language, writing during the day.

Five months after arriving in Porto, Rowling met the Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes in a bar and found that they shared an interest in Jane Austen. The relationship was troubled, but they married on 16 October 1992. Their daughter Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford) was born on 27 July 1993 in Portugal. By this time, Rowling had finished the first three chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone – almost as they were eventually published – and had drafted the rest of the novel. Rowling experienced domestic abuse during her marriage. Arantes said in June 2020 that he had slapped her and did not regret it. Rowling described the marriage as "short and catastrophic". She says she was not allowed to have a house key and that her husband used the growing manuscript of her first book as a hostage. Rowling and Arantes separated on 17 November 1993 after Arantes threw her out of the house; she returned with the police to retrieve Jessica and her belongings and went into hiding for two weeks before she left Portugal. In late 1993, with a draft of Harry Potter in her suitcase, Rowling moved with her daughter to Edinburgh, Scotland, planning to stay with her sister until Christmas. Her biographer Sean Smith raises the question of why Rowling did not stay with her father. Rowling has spoken of an estrangement from her father; he had married his secretary within two years of her mother's death, and The Scotsman reported th

Career

Rowling launched Pottermore in 2011, an e-book publisher and interactive content portal on which she would publish articles about the Harry Potter universe. Rowling had reserved e-book and audiobook publishing rights, and until 2015, sales could only be fulfilled through Pottermore, bypassing other marketing formats. In 2015 the innovative new media site moved to a more traditional content model, and Rowling allowed digital sales to transition to an industry standard open-commerce model. The site was migrated to Wizarding World Digital in 2019, retaining original content, and now operates under the name HarryPotter.com. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child premiered in the West End in May 2016 and on Broadway in July. At its London premiere, Rowling confirmed that she would not write any more Harry Potter books. Rowling collaborated with the writer Jack Thorne and the director John Tiffany. The stage play's script was published as a book in July 2016. The play follows the friendship between Harry's son Albus and Scorpius Malfoy, Draco Malfoy's son, at Hogwarts. Announced in April 2023, the Harry Potter television series will begin in 2026, span ten years of production and feature a series dedicated to each of the seven Harry Potter books, with Rowling as executive producer.

Books

Journal articles

Non-English news articles

The fortune

By 1998, Rowling was portrayed in the media as a "penniless divorcee hitting the jackpot". According to her biographer Sean Smith, the publicity became effective marketing for Harry Potter, but her journey from living on benefits to wealth brought, along with fame, concerns from different groups about the books' portrayals of the occult and gender roles. Ultimately, Smith says that these concerns served to "enhance [her] public profile rather than damage it". Rowling identifies as a Christian. Although she grew up next door to her church, accounts of the family's church attendance differ. She began attending a Church of Scotland congregation, where Jessica was christened, around the time she was writing Harry Potter. In a 2012 interview, she said she belonged to the Scottish Episcopal Church. Rowling has stated that she believes in God, but has experienced doubt. She does not believe in magic or witchcraft. Rowling married Neil Murray, a doctor, in 2001. The couple intended to marry that July in the Galapagos, but when this leaked to the press, they delayed their wedding and changed their holiday destination to Mauritius. After the UK Press Complaints Commission ruled that a magazine had breached Jessica's privacy when the eight-year-old was included in a photograph of the family taken during that trip, Murray and Rowling sought a more private and quiet place to live and work. Rowling bought Killiechassie, an estate house in Perthshire, Scotland, and on 26 December 2001, the couple had a small, private wedding there, officiated by an Episcopalian priest who travelled from Edinburgh. Their son, David Gordon Rowling Murray, was born in 2003, and their daughter Mackenzie Jean Rowling Murray in 2005. In 2004, Forbes named Rowling "the first billion-dollar author". Rowling denied that she was a billionaire in a 2005 interview. By 2012, Forbes concluded she was no longer a billionaire due to her charitable donations and high UK taxes, but it re-added her to its list of billionaires in 2025. She was named the world's highest paid author by Forbes in 2008, 2017 and 2019. Her UK sales total in excess of £238 million, which made her the best-selling living author in Britain, until 2025 when she was supplanted by Julia Donaldson. The 2021 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling's fortune at £820 million, ranking her as the 196th-richest person in the UK, and The National reported her net worth in 2025 as £945 million. As of 2020, she owns a £4.5 million Georgian house in Kensington and a £2 million home in Edinburgh, where she lives with Murray and her two youngest children. In February 2026, J. K. Rowling was listed on the Sunday Times Tax list with an estimated £47.5 million.

Rowling's charitable donations between 2005 and 2025 were estimated at over $200 million by Forbes, which also estimated she had donated $160 million before 2012. She was the second most generous UK donor in 2015 (following the singer Elton John), giving about $14 million. In 2000,