J. K. Rowling was born on July 31, 1965. She is currently 57.

Background

Joanne Rowling is her actual name, and she was born in Yate, Gloucestershire. Her parents had met a year before at King’s Cross station in London. When she turned four, she moved to Winterbourne, Gloucestershire with her younger sister and parents. They lived near a family called Potter. She loved reading. She also wrote her first book when she was six years old!

Around the age of eleven or twelve, she wrote a short story titled “The Seven Cursed Diamonds”. Her favorite teacher in secondary school, Lucy Shepherd, taught her the importance of structure and precision in writing. When her mother was 34, and she was 15, her mother was diagnosed with a “virulent strain”, and her life then became hard.

She wrote that her father would’ve preferred a son in 2020, and that she had severe OCD(obsessive-compulsive disorder). She started to smoke, and due to her complicated life at home, she became interested in her schoolwork. In 1982, she applied to Oxford University, but her application was rejected. Around the 1950s, she was on a delayed train for four hours, and that was when she though of Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, and the famous Harry Potter.

She began writing the Harry Potter books as soon as she got home. Later, in 1990, her mother died on December 30. She wrote in one of the Harry Potter books about a mirror that shows what you truly want, the Mirror of Erised. She made this mirror in honor of her mother.

Fun Facts

• She has no middle name
• Sadly, she never got to tell her mom she was writing the Harry Potter books.
• Hermione Granger was based off of herself.