J. K. Rowling

J. K. Rowling (born 1965) is a British author who created the Harry Potter series, seven novels published between 1997 and 2007 that have sold more than 600 million copies in 85 languages.

Joanne Rowling was born on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire. She studied French and classics at the University of Exeter and later trained as a teacher at Moray House School of Education. She has said the idea for Harry Potter came to her on a delayed train in 1990.

Bloomsbury published Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in London on 26 June 1997; Scholastic's Arthur A. Levine imprint issued it in the United States in September 1998 as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The series ended with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007, and the film adaptations ran from 2001 to 2011. Her first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, appeared in 2012. As Robert Galbraith she writes the Cormoran Strike crime novels, beginning with The Cuckoo's Calling (2013). Later children's books include The Ickabog (2020) and The Christmas Pig (2021).

For collectors. The first Bloomsbury hardback of Philosopher's Stone had a print run of 500 copies, about 300 of which went to libraries, and its jacket was illustrated by Thomas Taylor. Wikipedia reports copies from that run selling for as much as 471,000 US dollars at a Heritage auction in 2021. Prisoner of Azkaban was published by Bloomsbury on 8 July 1999; its first UK hardback state has a misplaced line break in a block quotation on page 7, corrected in two later states.