Pam Pollack - Who Is J.K. Rowling?

An Unauthorized Biography

By Pam Pollack and Meg Belviso
Illustrated by Stephen Marchesi

Grosset & Dunlap

An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

To Meg, my partner, whose creative genius I will always respectPP

To all the great friends Ive made in Harry Potter fandomMB

For Chris and Alex, ten years onSM

GROSSET & DUNLAP

Published by the Penguin Group

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Text copyright 2012 by Pamela D. Pollack and Margaret Dean Belviso. Illustrations copyright 2012 by Stephen Marchesi. Cover illustration copyright 2012 by Nancy Harrison. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Printed in the U.S.A.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012001406

ISBN: 978-1-101-57562-8 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

Do you know what a Muggle is? Do you know how to get to Platform 9 ? Do you have a favorite Bertie Botts Every Flavor Bean?

Muggles, Platform 9 , and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans were all created by one person: J. K. Rowling.

Jo, as she has been called since she was little, always wanted to be a writer. But being a writer would not be easy. What if no one wanted to buy her stories? So after she finished school in her early twenties, she got a job as a secretary in London, England. Jo made enough money to pay her bills.

Every day she filed papers and made copies. The next day was always the same as the last. But in her heart, she was still a writer. In her spare moments, she typed stories on her computer. She scribbled the names of imaginary people and places on the backs of papers. The stories didnt earn her any money. Still, she couldnt stop writing them.

UNITED KINGDOM

Writing stories also let Jo forget about the sad things in her life. Like her mother being very sick.

One weekend Jo took a trip to Manchester, a city in northern England. She was going to move there, and she needed a place to live. She had a long train ride back to London. She stared out the window, thinking of nothing.

Suddenly a picture of a boy popped into her head. He had round glasses and a scar shaped like a lightning bolt.

Jo reached into her bag. She wanted to write down everything about him. But she didnt have a pen. She turned back to the window and thought more about the boy. He was a wizard, but he didnt know it. He lived with a family who was not his real family. They kept his magic a secret. They hoped to squash it out of him. But the boys magic was too strong.

As the train sped through the English countryside, more people crowded into Jos head. They were people the boy knew. There was a ghost named Nearly Headless Nick. And a best friend with red hair. And a clever girl named Hermione.

By the time Jo reached London, she had a whole new world in her head. One day, she hoped, she could write a book about it. When she got home she found a pen. She pulled out a notebook. On the first page she wrote the name of the boy with the lightning bolt scar.

His name was Harry Potter.

Joanne Rowling always loved trains. Maybe it was because her parents met on a train. It was a chilly day, and her mother, Anne, said she was cold. A stranger named Peter offered her his coat. A year later they were married.

Jo was born at Yate General Hospital on July 31, 1965, in Gloucestershire, England. Two years later she had a little sister named Diana, or Di.

Jo made up stories to tell her little sister. In one story, Di fell down a rabbit hole. Luckily the family of rabbits who lived in the hole fed her strawberries. As they got older, Jo and Di played games. Their favorite was the cliff game. In that game, Jo dangled from the top stair of the staircase. She pretended she was on a cliff. She pleaded with Di to rescue her before she fell. But Di never helped. Finally Jo would fall to the floor, dead. Then they would start all over again. Only this time Di would be the one hanging off the cliff.

When they werent playing games, Jo and Di were often fighting. During one fight, Jo threw a battery at her sister, leaving a scar just above her eyebrow.

I didnt mean to hit her, Jo explained to her mother. I thought she would duck. But this excuse didnt stop her mother from being angrier than Jo had ever seen her.