Joanna Rowling
Pseudonym J· K. Rowling. British novelist, screenwriter and producer, represented in the Harry Potter series. Her Harry Potter was a worldwide hit, selling more than 400 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books of all time, and her adaptation of the same name became one of the highest-grossing films in film history. The series was fully licensed by Rowling, and she also personally served as the film executive producer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
She was born in Yat, Gloucestershire, England. In 1990, when she thought of the harry potter novel inspiration on a missed train from Manchester to London, she was also a fellow and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International. During the writing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Rowling experienced poverty, the death of her mother, and her first divorce, culminating in the publication of the first Harry Potter novel in 1997. Its sequels were published year by year, with the last of harry potter and the Deathly Hallows coming to an end in 2007. Rowling's next work, completely different from her famous work, is a tragicomedy novel for adult readers, "Occasional Vacancies", published in 2012. The following year, she published the crime novel The Call of the Cuckoo under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, which Rowling said would develop into a series.
J.K. Rowling's life is like the story of "Cinderella", from a poor single mother receiving government relief to a wealthy best-selling author in just 5 years. She is the UK's best-selling author on record, earning around £23.8 million in royalties. In 2008, the Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling's fortune at around £560 million, making her the 12th richest woman in the UK. Forbes named Rowling the 27th Most Influential Celebrity of 2007, and Time Magazine named her "social, moral and political impact on Harry Potter fans" as the 2007 Times Person of the Year. In October 2010, The Guardian named Rowling the most influential woman in the UK. She has also been involved in charity activities and has participated in many charitable groups.
Although Rowling most of the time uses her pen name "J. K. Rowling", but used the real name "Joanna Rowling" when Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published. Considering that the target audience of the book was a young boy, the publisher was afraid that she would not buy a book written by a female writer, so it suggested that she use the two-letter abbreviation as a pen name instead; but Rowling did not have a middle name, so she chose the "K" of her grandmother "Kathleen" as the second initial letter of her pen name. She always called herself "Jo" and said, "Nobody would call me Joanna when I was a kid unless they got angry." ”
King's Cross Railway Station
(Above: Rowling's parents met on a train departing from King's Cross Railway Station, so Rowling used King's Cross Station as an entrance to the wizarding world, which has now become a famous tourist attraction.) ）
Rowling was born on 31 July 1965 in Yet, Gloucestershire, England, the daughter of Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling. Her father, Peter, a flying machine engineer at Rolls-Royce Ltd. and a mother who was a scientist and technician, met in 1964 on a train bound for Abulos, which departed from King's Cross Railway Station. On March 14, 1965, Peter and Anne were married.
Rowling was a child at her home in Toulz Hill
Rowling's sister Diana was born when Rowling was 23 months old, and the family moved to the neighboring village of Winterburne when Rowling was 4 years old. Rowling attended St. Michael's Primary School in the village, a school founded by former British House of Commons member William Wilberforce and education reformer Hannah Moore. Alfred Dan, then principal of St. Michael's Elementary School, is believed to be the prototype for Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter novel.
Rowling has often written fantasy stories since she was a child and read them to her sister. "I remember telling her a story about her falling into a rabbit nest and the rabbit family in it fed her strawberries," she recalls. And the first story I wrote down (when I was 5 or 6 years old) about rabbits, also called rabbits. It had measles, and friends came to see it, including a giant bee called Miss Bee. When Rowling was 9 years old, the family moved to a church cottage in the village of Touzhill in Gloucestershire, which is close to Chepstow, Wales. During her adolescence, her aunt gave her a copy of the autobiography of Jessica Mitford, an old British social protest writer who became Rowling's hero, reading every book in Mitford.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Rowling said of her adolescence: "I was particularly unhappy. It was the worst phase of my life. "Her family life was terrible, Rowling was not getting along well with her father, and her mother was sick. When she entered Wyden School, her mother also worked as a technician in the school's science laboratory. Rowling says what she looked like in adolescence "is the prototype of Hermione Granger." She's an exaggerated version of me when I was 11 years old, and that's the way I'm not proud of. Rowling's English teacher at the school recalls that Rowling was not particularly outstanding at the time, but belonged to "a group of cheerful girls who did well in English." Her best friend from her senior year had a blue-green Ford, which appeared in Rowling's pen. Regarding Rowling's musical taste at that time, she said: "My favorite group is the Smith Orchestra," Rowling achieved excellent results and was elected as the female student president; she scored "A" in English, and two "A" and one "B" in French and German.
In 1982, Rowling took the Entrance Exam to Oxford University but was not admitted; later studied French and Classics at the University of Eichett, a place that shocked her and "expected to get along with many similar but radical-minded people". When she joins a group of like-minded people and starts making friends, she feels like she's being herself. Martin, a professor of French at the University of Echt, recalls Rowling in college: "A quiet and capable student, always wearing a tannin coat, with dark hair, and in academic language, she had a capable appearance. However, according to Rowling's own recollections, she felt that she "did nothing" in college, and that she "drew deep eyeliner, always listening to the Smith Choir and reading dickens and Tolkien's books." Rowling spent a year in Paris as an exchange student and graduated from the University of Echt in 1986; then moved to London to work as a fellow and bilingual secretary at Amnesty International.
After ending her work at Amnesty International, Rowling moved to Manchester with her then-boyfriend. In 1990, when she was sitting on a train from Manchester to London that was delayed by four hours, the story of a young boy studying at a wizarding school popped into her head. She told The Boston Globe: "I don't really know where the inspiration came from, it started with Harry, other characters and plots slowly surfaced, and finally occupied my mind. ”
J.K. Rowling introduced Harry Potter on her personal website:
“
As I embarked on a personal journey on a crowded train to London, Harry Potter came to my mind. I've been writing non-stop since I was 6 years old, but I've never been so excited about an idea until then. At that time, I was facing the biggest dilemma in my life, I couldn't find a pen to write, and I was ashamed to borrow money from people... I don't have a pen that I can use, but I think that's really a good idea. I sat down and started thinking, outlining all the details in 4 hours (the train was dropped by 4 hours). The skinny, bespectacled, dark-haired boy who had never thought he was a wizard before became more real. If I grasp the inspiration and write it slowly on paper, I may kill it (sometimes I wonder how much I forgot before I actually picked up the pen and wrote it down?). ）。 I began writing Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone at a later date, although none of the original pieces of paper resembled the later finals.
”
As soon as Rowling reached her terminus, she immediately began to write. In December 1990, Rowling's mother died of multiple sclerosis that had been onset for 10 years. Rowling said: "I wrote Harry Potter when my mother died, but I didn't tell her I had the book. This upheaval had a big impact on Rowling, and she thought that many of the details of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone were lost at this time, because she remembered how it felt at that time.
Porto
(Above: Rowling used to work as a teacher in Porto.) In 1993, she returned to england to accompany her daughter, but by the time Harry Potter chapter three was completed, her marriage had begun to deteriorate.)
According to media reports, Rowling had moved to Porto, the second largest city in Portugal, to teach English there. She taught at night and wrote while listening to Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto during the day. She meets the Portuguese journalist George Alandis at a bar and chats with Jane Austen, whose books are a common interest. On October 16, 1992, Rowling married Arandis, by which time they already had a child, named Jessica Isabelle Rowling Alandis, born on July 23, 1993. Previously, Rowling had miscarried. The two divorced on November 17, 1993, ending their 13-month and one-day marriage. Biographers write that Rowling suffered domestic violence at the time, but no one else knows the full details of the marriage. In an interview, George Alandis mentioned that on their last night, he dragged Rowling out of the house and beat her on the head, at 5 a.m. In December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved back to Scotland, England, to live near rowling's sister's home in Edinburgh, with three chapters of the completed Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone manuscript in a suitcase.
At this point, Rowling had been out of the University of Echt for 7 years and had dubbed herself "the most failed person I've ever met." Her marriage ended in failure, with no job and a child waiting to be fed; but she described the failure as a kind of liberation:
Failure means getting rid of unnecessary things, I stop deceiving myself, simply being true to myself, and devoting all my efforts to the only work that matters. If I had succeeded elsewhere before, I might never have had the determination to devote myself to a field that I was confident really belonged to. I'm free again! Because though my greatest fears have come, and I am still alive, I have a lovely daughter, an old typewriter, and great ideas. What once fell to a deep valley has become a deep foundation for future rebirth.
During that low period, Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression and tried to commit suicide. The dark feelings during the melancholy attack became the inspiration for Rowling's creation of the Dementor, a dark creature in Harry Potter that sucks up positive human emotions and even souls. Rowling, who had to receive social assistance from the government, described the economic situation at that time as "even in modern Britain, it is called poor, but there is no homelessness".
Rowling's condition worsened when her ex-husband visited their mother and daughter in Britain. She appealed to the court for a protective order, forcing Alandis to return to Portugal alone and filed for divorce in August 1994. Later, while training as a teacher at the University of Edinburgh's Morey School of Education, she completed her first novel and also improved her financial situation. Rowling has written in many cafes, including the Nicholson Cafe and the Elephant Cafe, wherever she takes her sleeping daughter with her. In a 2001 interview with the BBC, Rowling denied the rumor that she was writing in a café because her home didn't have heating: "I wasn't stupid enough to rent an unheated house in the middle of Edinburgh's midwinter. I have heating in my house. She said on American television that walking with her baby is a way to keep them asleep, which is why she chose to write in cafes.
On 26 December 2001, Rowling and anesthesiologist Neil Murray had a private wedding in Aberfield, Scotland. The couple's eldest son, David, was born on March 24, 2003, when Rowling was about to begin writing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and she had to pause writing to take care of the baby. Later, the youngest daughter was born, and the Rowling family now lives in Edinburgh, England.
In 2004, Forbes listed Rowling as the first writer to become a billionaire by writing. Rowling questioned the calculation, saying that although she was rich, she was not yet a billionaire. In addition, in 2008, rowling was the 144th richest person in the UK by the Sunday Age Rich List; in 2012, Forbes removed Rowling from the rich list, claiming that she was no longer a billionaire due to her large donations (about $160 million) and the high tax rate imposed on her by the United Kingdom. In February 2013, BBC's fourth programme, Women's Time, named Rowling the 13th most powerful woman in the UK.
The café where J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is located in Edinburgh, England
In 1995, Rowling used an old manual typewriter to complete the original Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Her work was affirmed by Brianne Evans, the business manager of the literary agent Christopher Little, who, after reading three chapters of Rowling's work, decided to introduce the manuscript to Little. Previously, Rowling had submitted articles to 4 publishing houses, but all of them were rejected. Little introduced Rowling's work to Bloomsbury, a London publishing house, and won the favor of its editor, Berry Cunningham, for £1,500 as Rowling's contribution. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was perhaps credited to Alice Newton, the publisher's 8-year-old daughter; when she finished the first chapter, she immediately asked her father for follow-up. Although Bloomsbury agreed to publish Rowling's work, Cunningham suggested that Rowling find a full job because he did not think Rowling could make money by writing children's books. However, in 1997, Rowling received an £8,000 scholarship from the Scottish Arts Society to encourage her to continue writing.
In June 1997, Bloomsbury officially published Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, with an initial of 1,000 copies, of which 500 will become the library's collection. The 1,000 books are worth around £16,000 to £25,000 today. Five months after publication, Rowling won her first award: the Nestlé Smart Bean Children's Book Award. He went on to win the National Book Award for Best Children's Book of the Year. In 1998, the U.S. rights to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone were won at an auction by Scholastic Inc. for $105,000. Rowling said that when she heard the news, she was "(happily) dying". In October 1998, Scholastic Inc. officially published Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and the proceeds from the sale allowed Rowling to move out of the apartment and move to a better neighbourhood in Edinburgh. At first, her neighbors were unaware of the arrival of the Harry Potter series authors in the community, as the biographer wrote: "Most people respected her and gave her space, which is what they wanted." ”
Rowling won her second Nestlé Smart Bean Children's Book Award in July 1998 with the sequel Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which she won again in December 1999, becoming the first author to win the Nestlé Smart Bean Children's Book Award three times in a row. Rowling later declined the award, giving the opportunity to other books. In January 2000, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban won the Whitblatt Prize for Best Children's Book of the Year.
The fourth episode of Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was released simultaneously in the United Kingdom and the United States on July 8, 2000, breaking sales records in both countries, with 372,775 copies sold on the first day of release in the United Kingdom, almost the total of the first year of sales of the previous game Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. In the United States, more than three million copies were sold in 48 hours, breaking the record for book sales. Rowling admits that there was a turning point in writing the book: "Halfway through the fourth episode, I noticed a serious flaw in the plot... I've had the darkest moments with this book... There was a chapter that I rewrote 13 times. ”
It took Rowling three years to write the fifth episode, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This interval had caused publishers to wonder if Rowling had cerebral occlusion, but she herself denied it. Rowling later admitted that writing the book was a chore: "I think the Order of the Phoenix should be shorter," she said, "I know I ran out of time and energy when I wrote the ending." ”
The sixth episode, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was released on July 16, 2005, breaking sales records again: nine million copies sold in 24 hours. During the book's writing, Rowling told fans online: "I had been planning the sixth episode for several years, but before I could start writing it seriously, I spent another two months re-planning and making absolute assurances to myself: I knew what I was doing. She notes on her personal website: The dialogue between the Minister for Magic and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was originally scheduled to be placed in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. In 2006, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was named The British Book Award for Book of the Year.
The final installment of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was announced on December 21, 2006. On 11 January 2007, J.K. Rowling finished her book in her hotel room at the Beymore Hotel in Edinburgh. The book went on sale at 00:01 AST on July 21, 2007, and sold 11 million copies in the Uk and the United States on its first day. Rowling said that when she wrote the final chapter, she felt "very much like 1990", the earliest work in the series. During Rowling's writing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, she allowed ITV to produce a documentary for her, which aired on 30 December 2007 under the title J. K. Rowling: A Brilliant Year. In the film, Rowling returns to the cheap apartment she lived in when she first wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and she can't help but cry: "[There] completely changed my life." In oprah's interview, Rowling credited the success of the Harry Potter series to her mother.
Harry Potter now has a global brand value of $15 billion, and the last four episodes of the novel have broken book sales records. The entire Harry Potter series has been translated into 65 languages and distributed worldwide. In addition, Harry Potter is also recognized as a novel that has rekindled the reading trend of teenagers who have only used computers and television since childhood.
Three protagonists
In October 1998, Warner Bros. bought the film adaptations of the first two novels of Harry Potter from J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was released on November 16, 2001, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on November 15, 2002, both directed by American director Chris Columbus. On June 4, 2004, the film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, directed by Mexican director Alfonso Curran, was released. The fourth film in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was directed by British director Michael Newell and released on November 18, 2005. On July 11, 2007, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, directed by David Yes and written by Michael Gutenberg, was released, and was the first Harry Potter film series to be unscheduled by Steve Clevu. On July 15, 2009, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was released, still directed by David Yates, but written by original screenwriter Steve Clevu. In March 2008, Warner Bros. announced that the finale of the Harry Potter series, Deathly Hallows, would be filmed in the first and second episodes. The two films were released in November 2010 (part 1) and July 2011 (part 2), both directed by David Yates.
When Warner Bros. made a contract with J.K. Rowling, it accepted a considerable number of her requests and opinions; including that the film must be shot in the UK and the actors must be British. The studios did comply with her terms, and most of the Harry Potter casts were selected in Britain. Rowling also demanded that the Coca-Cola Company, which won the right to advertise its products in the Harry Potter films, must donate $18 million to Reading Is Fundamental, an American child literacy organization, as part of a philanthropic program.
With the exception of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix films, the rest of the Harry Potter films were written by Steve Clevue, who also received a lot of help from Rowling in writing the script to ensure that the script did not contradict the content of Rowling's future work. Rowling had said that Kleww knew the most about the sequel before she published the Harry Potter sequel, but she didn't tell him the whole story. British actor Alan Rickman, who played Potions professor Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films, and Robbie Cottleani, who played the ranch caretaker Rubeus Hagrid, have also received plot content related to their roles but have not yet been published. As for the British child star Daniel Radcliffe, who plays the main character Harry Potter, he asked Rowling if Harry Potter would die in the novel, and Rowling replied that "you will have death shots", but did not explicitly answer the question. American director Steven Spielberg had an interest in directing the Harry Potter series of films, but later gave up. Publishers have repeatedly claimed that Rowling was involved in the decision to direct, but Rowling said she never intervened in the director's choice, nor did she stop Spielberg from directing the Harry Potter films. Rowling's only involvement in the selection was when she wanted to direct the film by Terry Giren, a member of the British comedy group Monty Payson, because she was a big fan of Girlian, but Warner Bros. decided that the Harry Potter film was a little more family-friendly, so he chose to direct it by Chris Columbus.
Even so, Rowling was actively involved in the harry pottery film production process, not only did all the scripts need to be reviewed by her, but also personally supervised the first and second episodes of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. On her personal website, Rowling revealed that she had considered making a cameo appearance in harry potter's "Elis Mirror" shot in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone; but gave up because she didn't think she was suitable for the big screen yet. The role of Lily Potter ended with the British actress Giratin Somafi.
Rowling's life, although it experienced a low tide, never gave up. As long as you do what you really want to do in your heart, good luck will always come with you.