The first two novels she wrote were for adults which never got published. So it is ironic that J.K. Rowling, 34, should end up writing primarily for children. She says she did not plan it that way, it just happened. After leaving Exeter University, where she read French and Classics, she started work as a teacher but daydreamed about becoming a writer. One day, stuck on a delayed train for four hours between Manchester and London, she dreamt up a boy called Harry Potter. That was in 1990. For the next five years Rowling worked on Book One and plotted out the whole series, comprising seven novels, one for each year Harry spends at Hogwarts. In the meantime, she went to teach in Portugal, married a Portuguese TV journalist, had her daughter, Jessica, divorced her husband and returned to Britain when Jessica was just three months old with no job in hand.
Rowling's sudden penury made her realise that it was "back-against-the-wall time" and she decided to finish her Harry Potter book. She could not face her cold and miserable flat, so she would walk the streets of Edinburgh, pushing Jessica in a buggy until she fell asleep, and would then rush into a cafe and write for two hours, the baby sleeping next to her. Once the matter was ready, she typed out two manuscripts—she could not afford to photocopy it—and sent them to two agents in London whom she had picked out of a yearbook in the local library. The rest is history.
Rowling says the urge to be a writer came to her early, during what she describes as a "dreamy" internal childhood. She began writing stories when she was six. She also read widely, whipping through Ian Fleming at age nine. Sometime later she discovered Jane Austen, whom Rowling calls "my favorite author ever".
Her first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, won the Smarties Prize—the children's equivalent of the Booker—and sold 70,000 copies in Britain. It was sold to eight other countries, netting a $100,000 advance for the American edition, a huge sum for a first novel, unheard-of for a children's novel.
