Meet JK ‘Harry Potter’ Rowling, the author who has cast a magical spell with her book series...
According to Forbes, Rowling’s net earnings as of June 2013 were $ 13 million. But the journey to the top wasn’t easy.
In 1990, her world was rocked when her mother died. Rowling left England to teach English in Portugal when she met her first husband, a journalist. Around this time, she started writing. In 1993, Jessica, their daughter, was born, but the marriage ended. Rowling moved to Edinburgh to live near her sister, living off welfare payments. To get over the upheavals in her life, she developed the fantasy world of Harry Potter. She would wander around town pushing Jessica in a pram until the baby fell asleep; then she would head for a coffee shop to write. In 1997, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published. And the success story had begun...
‘Rock bottom became the solid foundation for me’
JK Rowling delivered the commencement address at Harvard University in 2008 where she discussed the power of failure and gave some powerful advice to freshers: I think it is fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless.
The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure, I knew. Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy-tale resolution. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena, I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default. The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. (excerpts from jk rowling’s speech at harvard in 2008)
Rowling writes book in different name
JK Rowling has published a critically acclaimed crime novel under a pseudonym. Her name was disclosed by the Sunday Times newspaper as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling. The book was purportedly written by Robert Galbraith, described by the publisher as a former member of the Royal Military Police who has since 2003 been working in the civilian security industry. The newspaper checked Galbraith’s ‘background’ after suspicions were raised about how a first-time author with a background in the military could write such an assured debut novel. After being outed, Rowling, said: “It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.”