J.K. Rowling’s Rise To Riches
“I have not forgotten what it feels like to worry whether I’ll have enough money to pay the bills.” ne long train ride from Manchester to London, the characters Harry Potter, Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger came into the mind of a young lady named Joanne Rowling. Over the next six years, Joanne would map out all seven books of the series, writing mostly in longhand on odd scraps of paper. She would eventually assume the pen name J.K. Rowling, publish Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone and her series would eventually sell more than 450 million copies, win innumerable awards and be made into Hollywood films. In a classic rags to riches tale, Rowling came from humble beginnings. When she began Harry Potter, she was a single mother, impoverished, and depressed. Still, she managed to push through and chase her dreams. Born in Bristol in 1965, Joanne grew up surrounded by literature, saying “I lived for books. I was your basic common or garden variety bookworm, complete with freckles and National Health spectacles.” On her website she wrote that she had always known she would be a book author. “As soon as I knew what
writers were, I wanted to be one. I’ve got the perfect temperament for a writer; perfectly happy alone in a room, making things up.” She wrote her first book about a rabbit, called ‘Rabbit’. At just eleven, she wrote her first novel – about seven cursed diamonds and the people who owned them. When her mother praised her work, she says she “stood there and thought, well, get it published then.” Her teenage years were unhappy with a complicated home life due to her mother being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and a strained relationship with her father. She describes the most traumatising moment in her life as the day her mother died. It was New Year’s Day in 1991 when Rowling was 25, about six months after she began writing Harry Potter. The loss of her mother would eventually lead Rowling to make Harry Potter suffer the death of his parents. “My books are largely about death,” she told the Telegraph in 2006, referencing the death of Harry’s parents and villain Voldemort’s obsession with immortality. “I so understand why Voldemort wants to conquer death. We’re all frightened of it,” she said.
youthinbusinessmagazine.com
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