J k Rowling (Journey of Life)

If  Edison was the King of Failures, J k Rowling would be the queen of Rejections.

J k Rowling was working as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International when she conceived the idea for the Harry Potter series while on a delayed train from Manchester to London in 1990. The seven-year period that followed saw the death of her mother, birth of her first child, divorce from her first husband, and relative poverty until the first novel in the series, HARRY  POTTER and THE PHILOSOPHER's STONE,  was published in 1997. There were six sequels, of which the last, HARRY POTTER and THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, was released in 2007. Since then, Rowling has written five books for adult readers too.

J k Rowling  is the world's first billionaire author. But soon she lost her billionaire status after giving away much of her earnings to charity but remains one of the wealthiest people in the world.She is the UK's best-selling living author. She supported multiple charities, Like Comic Relife, One Parent Families and Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain, as well as launching her own charity, LUMOS. 

Joanne Rowling was born on 31 July 1965in Yate, daughter of science technician Anne and Rolls-Royce aircraft engineer Peter James Rowling. Her parents got married on 14 March 1965.As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories which she frequently read to her sister.When she was a young teenager, her great-aunt gave her a copy of Jessica Mitford's autobiography, "Hons and Rebels". Since then Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling read all of her books.

J k Rowling has said that her teenage years were unhappy. Her home life was complicated. Rowling later said that she based the character of Hermione Granger on herself when she was eleven. Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth, owned a turquoise Ford Anglia ,which she says inspired a flying version that appeared in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

As a child, J k Rowling attended St Michael's Primary School,Her headmaster at St Michael's, Alfred Dunn, has been suggested as the inspiration for the Harry Potter headmaster Albus Dumbledore. 

 After working as a researcher and bilingual secretary in London for Amnesty International, J k Rowling moved with her  boyfriend to Manchester, where she worked at the Chamber of Commerce. In 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into her mind.


Seven years after graduating from university, J k Rowling saw herself as a failure. Her marriage had failed, and she was jobless with a dependent child, but she described her failure as liberating and allowing her to focus on writing. During this period, Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression and contemplated suicide. Her illness inspired the characters known as De mentors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book. Rowling signed up for welfare benefits, describing her economic status as being "poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless."

In a 2001 BBC interview, J k Rowling denied the rumor that she wrote in local cafés to escape from her unheated flat, pointing out that it had heating. One of the reasons she wrote in cafés was that taking her baby out for a walk was the best way to make her fall asleep.

 In 1995, Rowling finished her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone which was typed on an old manual typewriter.The book was submitted to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected the manuscript. A year later she was finally given the green light (and a £1,500 advance) by editor Barry Cunningham from Bloomsbury, a publishing house in London. The decision to publish Rowling's book owes much to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury's chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father and immediately demanded the next . Although Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, Cunningham says that he advised Rowling to get a day job, since she had little chance of making money in children's books. Soon after, in 1997, J k Rowling received an £8,000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council to enable her to continue writing.

In June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher's Stone with an initial print run of 1,000 copies, 500 of which were distributed to libraries. Its sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was published in July 1998 and again Rowling won the Smarties Prize. In December 1999, the third novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the Smarties Prize, making J k Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth Harry Potter novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance. In January 2000, Prisoner of Azkaban won the inaugural Whitbread Children's Book of the Year award, though it lost the Book of the Year prize to Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf.
The fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was released simultaneously in the UK and the US on 8 July 2000 and broke sales records in both countries. 372,775 copies of the book were sold in its first day in the UK, almost equalling the number Prisoner of Azkaban sold during its first year. In the US, the book sold three million copies in its first 48 hours, smashing all records. Rowling said that she had had a crisis while writing the novel and had to rewrite one chapter many times to fix a problem with the plot. J k Rowling was named Author of the Year in the 2000 British Book Awards.


I think it’s finally settled – success stories are built on the back of hard work and steely determination, not daydreaming during the job.