Joanne Kathleen Rowling was born on July 31st, 1965. She has one younger sister, Di, who was born two years after J.K. Rowling. She started writing stories as early as five or six years old. Her first story was about a rabbit named Rabbit who caught the measles and was visited by friends like a giant bee named Miss Bee.

J.K. moved twice when she was growing up. She moved from Yate to Winterbourne. She met two children in Winterbourne who were her friends whose last name was Potter. Then she moved to Tutshill when she was nine years old. She attended Tutshill Primary School and then J.K. went to Wyedean Comprehensive. Her favorite subject was English. She went to Exeter University and after graduating she was a secretary for a few years.

In 1990, J.K. moved to Portugal to teach English. At this time she started writing her third book after discarding the first two. This book was about a boy who found out he was a wizard and was sent off to a wizard school.

J.K. meet and married a Portuguese journalist and had a daughter in 1993, and named her Jessica. Her marriage ended in a divorce and J.K. took her daughter and moved to Edinburgh, Scotland. She set herself a deadline to finish her book and wrote in a café while Jessica was napping.

After a number of rejections, she finally sold Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone to Bloomsbury. A few months later Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic Press bought the American rights and she had enough money to give up teaching.

Bloomsbury Children’s Books published the book in the UK in June of 1997. Harry Potter won The British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year, and the Smarties Prize.

The United States published the book in September 1998 and renamed it Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets was published in the UK in July of 1998 and in the United States in June of 1999. Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban was published in the UK in July of 1999 and in the United States in September of 1999.