I lived for books. I was your basic-or-common garden bookworm, complete with freckles and National Health spectacles. (jkrowling.com)
Long before the boy who lived in the cupboard under the stairs captured the imagination of book nerds, young and adult alike, across countries, a little, bespectacled girl in Gloucestershire, England, let her mind wander wild and a giant rabbit hopped out to tell his story. Joanne Rowling was six when she wrote Rabbit. Five years later, she wrote her first novel, about seven cursed diamonds and the people who owned them (now you get the relevance of seven and eleven in Harry Potter, don't you?). But the rabbit and the diamonds never saw the light of the day, Harry Potter did.
I just thought I want to write so I wrote the book. What was the worst that could happen? It could get turned down by every publisher in Britain. Big deal. (J.K. Rowling: A Year In The Life, a TV documentary)
And, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Rowling’s first book, did get “loads” of rejections before it was published by Bloomsbury in 1997. The lightning bolt of an idea about an orphan wizard struck her on a train journey from Manchester to King’s Cross Station, London, in 1990. The rest, as they say, is history.
But, Potterverse has more than just the seven books, the last of which came out in 2007 (I would rather eat one of Hagrid’s Rock Cakes than accept that Rowling wrote The Cursed Child (2016)—the latter’s harder to digest!). In 2001, she published Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages, both of which appear as titles of textbooks in the Harry Potter series. What makes Fantastic Beasts a fun read is the scattered scribbling across the book by Harry and Ron, who shares Harry’s book because “his fell apart” and he would rather spend money on dungbombs than on a new book because “Dungbombs rule”. The book on Quidditch is a property of Hogwarts library, and therefore is sans any scribbling. And though the vile Rita Skeeter, in her review, said, “I’ve read worse.”, the book has received genuine praise from the likes of Bathilda Bagshot and even Gilderoy Lockhart. Both the books were published in aid of Comic Relief, a charity organisation.
In 2008, she came out with The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which features in The Deathly Hallows, in aid of her children’s charity organisation, Lumos. Watch out for the footnotes by Professor Albus Dumbledore; they are witty at times and not always as vague as “Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!”
Obviously I need to be in some form of vehicle to have a decent idea. This time I was on a plane. And I thought: local election! And I just knew. I had that totally physical response you get to an idea that you know will work. It's a rush of adrenaline, it's chemical. I had it with Harry Potter and I had it with this. So that's how I know. (The Guardian)
There is nothing casual about The Casual Vacancy. Rowling’s first adult novel, published in 2012, did not live up to her fans’ expectations. How could it? For, they were expecting, say, a Hogwarts, and Pagford, with all its charms of a West Country village, was anything but magical—the Dursleys would have been completely at home here. The story revolves around the vacancy in the parish council following the death of a councillor, and subsequently reveals the divide and the dark side of the Pagford people in the run-up to the election. The book received a mixed response, with some calling it ‘bleak’ and others ‘brilliant’. But many critics argued that the book wouldn’t have been judged so harshly or, for that matter, hyped even, had it not carried Rowling’s name.
I was yearning to go back to the beginning of a writing career in this new genre, to work without hype or expectation and to receive totally unvarnished feedback. It was a fantastic experience and I only wish it could have gone on a little longer. (robert-galbraith.com)
Rowling, perhaps, agreed with those critics. Therefore, she wrote The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013), a crime novel, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. And, it worked well for a while, receiving critical acclaim in the initial months. But the secret was out sooner than she expected. Naturally, the sales increased, so did the popularity of its main characters—private investigator Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott. The Cuckoo’s Calling was followed by The Silkworm in 2014 and by Career of Evil in 2015. Last heard, Rowling’s “crime writing alter ego” will soon be out with the fourth Cormoran Strike novel, Lethal White.
I love writing. We all know I don’t actually need to write anymore. That’s a given. I write because I just love writing. It gets me up every day. I would be writing no matter what. (CNN)
So, what's next? Rowling is currently busy writing the screenplay of the sequel to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. But does she have anything magical up her sleeves? Just dig in to her wardrobe, and you will find a fairy tale hanging in there. The theme of her 50th birthday, which she celebrated last Halloween (though her birthday, like Harry’s, is on July 31), was “come as your own private nightmare”—she turned up as a lost manuscript. “I wrote over a dress most of that book. So that book, I don’t know whether it will ever be published, but it’s actually hanging in a wardrobe currently,” she recently told CNN.
So, who’s up for raiding her closet?
