All this has made Jo literally richer than the Queen of England, and people have become obsessed with her financial status, before and after the Potter books. She also writes the Cormoran Strike crime series, under the pen name Robert Galbraith (described by the publisher as, “a former plainclothes Royal Military Police investigator who had left in 2003 to work in the civilian security industry”). In 2001 Jo expanded her Potter oeuvre to include “textbooks” from Hogwarts- Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (writing as the fictitious magizoologist Newt Scamander)-and in 2012 published her first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy. I haven’t seen the play, but I’m a bit disheartened to think that after his epic childhood and teen years, Harry grew up to become, essentially, a civil servant.īut wait, there’s more. In the sequel, Harry has become an employee at the Ministry of Magic. It takes place 19 years in the future after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh book in the series. A two-part West End stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, opened in 2016. More than 600,000 pieces of Harry Potter fan fiction have been produced, and about a hundred more pieces have been posted online since I began writing this sentence. The books begat the movies, which begat the theme park attractions. They’ve been published in 73 languages (including Latin and ancient Greek, just for kicks), and have sold 450 million copies, give or take. The last four of the seven volumes hold records for the fastest sales. The seven Harry Potter books became the best-selling literary series in history. Pretty much every superlative came to pass. ![]() Then, an editor at Bloomsbury, aka the Smartest Man in Publishing, bought the manuscript for $2,250. People apparently thought the boarding school trope had been played out, even if it was a wizard boarding school that featured a partially decapitated ghost named Nearly Headless Nick. After she was finished, the manuscript was rejected a dozen times. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was written in Edinburgh cafés while she lived hand to mouth and cared for her baby. Hoping to make a new start, Jo moved to Scotland at the end of 1993. By every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew,” she confessed. “I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. A daughter, Jessica, was born in 1993-but the marriage didn’t last, and Jo soon found herself back in England with an infant, three chapters of her wizard book, and not much else. On a whim she moved to Porto, Portugal, where she met and married journalist Jorge Arantes. ![]() She started writing, but when her mother died, she lost her momentum. Four years later, while sitting on a delayed train en route to London, she got the idea for a book about a boy wizard who takes a magical train to his magical boarding school. In 1986, after graduation, she worked for Amnesty International. In 1982, Jo applied to Oxford, didn’t get in, and wound up studying French and classics at Exeter. She became the girl with heavy eyeliner, binge-reading Tolkien while The Smiths pumped through her headphones. ![]() Anne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when Jo was 15, which put an abrupt end to the luxury of being a bookish, sheltered child. Her father, Peter, was a Rolls Royce aircraft engine mechanic her mother, Anne, a science technician in the chemistry department at Jo and her younger sister’s high school. She grew up in middle-class English villages-the first outside Bristol, the next farther west in the Forest of Dean. Her own origin story has become as well known as Harry Potter’s. Jo has always been scrappy, so either old habits die hard or she sees no reason to stop now. Instead, she stays in the fray, enjoys stirring things up. Tetchy on Twitter, out and proud about her progressive politics, Jo (as she calls herself) isn’t interested in remaining imprisoned by her role as creator of one of the most beloved fictional universes in literary history. Given her monumental literary success, happy marriage to a loving Scottish doctor, three beautiful children, posh residences scattered around the UK, blond English rose beauty, and ability to rock dangly earrings, there is no reason on Earth for J.
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