Friday, November 30, 2007

J. K. Rowling

J. K. Rowling (born 1966) has sold more than a quarter-billion books from her series of novels about a British boy wizard named Harry Potter. With the wildly popular series--a seventh was announced late in 2006--Rowling singlehandedly revived the market for children's literature. The books, translated into more than 600 languages, spawned a sequence of worldwide box-office movie hits, and were credited with getting an entire generation of children raised on video games, television, and the Internet interested in reading again.

Born in 1966, in Chipping Sodbury, a small town in Bristol, England located a few miles south of Dursley, hometown to her fictional protagonist Harry Potter, Joanne Rowling was the daughter of a French-Scottish mother named Anne, and a Rolls Royce engineer father named Peter Rowling, who met on a train leaving King's Cross Station in London. She also has one older sister, Diana. In 1971, the Rowlings moved to nearby Winterbourne, in Bristol, and among the children's friends were Ian and Vikki Potter. Three years later, the family moved again, to Tutshill, near the border of Wales.

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