J.K.

Rowling
In this success story, we are going to share J.K. Rowling biography, a British
novelist best known as the author of the Harry Potter book series. The books were
translated into 73 different languages and sold more than 450 million copies. They
have become the best-selling book series in history. Also, they have been the basis
for a series of films, which is ranked as the second highest-grossing film series in
history. The distinctive personality traits of J.K. Rowling are perseverance,
leadership, effective communication.

Early Years

Joanne “Jo” Rowling, OBE FRSL, best known as J.K. Rowling, was born on June 31,

1965, in a small town of Yate, Gloucestershire, England. Her pen name, J.K., she

incorporated from her grandmother’s name, Kathleen. Rowling does not have a

middle name.Her father, Peter James Rowling, was an engineer at a legendary

British company Rolls-Royce and her mother, Anne Rowling (née Volant), was a

half-French and half-Scottish science technician. Joanne’s parents were both

Londoners. They met each other on a train while traveling from King’s Cross station

to Arbroath in Scotland, both of them were eighteen years old. Her father was

about to join the Royal Navy; her mother was off to join the Women’s Royal Naval

Service. Anne was cold, and Peter offered her a half share in his coat. A year later,

they got married. Soon, they left the Navy service and relocated to the suburb of

Bristol, in the West of England.In 1969, four years after the birth of Joanne, the

family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne. Joanne was a small, rotund girl,

wearing glasses. Always being a dreamer, she loved to narrate her incredible

fairytale stories. Joanne wrote her first story when she was six years old. It was a

fairy tale about a rabbit, called Rabbit, who had measles. His friends came to visit

him with a giant bee, called Miss Bee. Joanne’s younger sister Dee was the first

listener to her stories. The childhood of the future novelist cannot be called difficult.

On the contrary, it was a quiet and happy childhood that she spent in surrounding

of caring parents, favorite sister, and grandmother. Joanne enjoyed studying at St

Michael’s Primary School and loved modeling clay pottery, painting and learning of

the history of literature. However, her parents always wanted to buy their house in

the UK, and when Joanne was nine years old, they moved to the village Tutshill, in

the County of Forest of Dean.At this time, Joanne Rowling took a fancy to literature

thanks to her mother. Her mother gave all her time to the family, so she wanted to

provide a good education to her daughters. Anne read many books to her

daughters and by the years of five, Joanne could retell every single book almost by

heart. Joanne attended St. Michael’s Primary School, founded by abolitionist William

Wilberforce and education reformer Hannah More 200 years ago. At school, she

realized that her favorite subject was the English language and reading. At the

same time, Joanne encountered some problems because of her math teacher, Mrs.

Morgan, hostility. She labeled the left side of the classroom as the side for the

smartest kids in the class. Mrs. Morgan always requested Joanne to sit right side of

the class. Joanne was very frustrated, as she knew she was an intelligent student.

Later, Rowling has admitted that she modeled the character Severus Snape after

Mrs. Morgan.However, Rowling had several teachers who did encourage her to

write. She had a couple of primary school teachers who, when reading out her work

to the class, made Joanne feel very special. They did, and Rowling remember those

teachers until now. “The pride I felt at my work read out to other students was a

very big deal to me. You never forget the teachers who said to you, “You can do

this”,” Joanne recalls.Joanne was shy a child. Classmates remember herself as an

unsociable and secretive girl, who lives in the world of fantasy and always writes

something in her notebook. At the age of 15, her family moved again. Rowling

missed her friends, but misfortunes never come alone. Around the same time,

Joanne’s favorite granny died, her relationship with her father soured, and her

mother became seriously ill with multiple sclerosis. Treatment did not give a

positive result, so Anne Rowling’s condition was getting worse every year. For the

young girl, mother’s illness was the biggest shock of her life.After graduating from
Wyedean School in 1983, Joanne Rowling decided to enter Oxford University. She

had successfully passed the entrance exams but was not accepted to one of the

most prestigious British universities. However, she entered the University of Exeter

located in Exeter, South West England, the United Kingdom on the faculty of

philology, where she was intensely studying French. In fact, this idea belonged to

her parents, who hoped that their daughter would be able to make a career of

bilingual secretary in the future. Martin Sorrell, a French professor at Exeter,

remembers Rowling as “a quietly competent student, with a denim jacket and dark

hair, who, in academic terms, gave the appearance of doing what was necessary.”

According to Joanne’s memories, she was doing little work, preferring to read

Dickens and Tolkien and listen to “The Smiths.” In 1986, after a year of internships

in Paris, Rowling graduated Exeter with a diploma of Bachelor of Arts in French and

Classics. After that, Joanne moved to London and changed several jobs. Soon she

worked as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International, but she

knew that it did not fit her.