Creator / J. K. Rowling

Joanne ("J.K.") Rowling (born July 31, 1965), is one of the richest and most influential women alive today (she holds the distinction of being the first novelist to become a billionaire in US dollars solely through writing), and is the author of the Harry Potter heptalogy. Her published works so far include:

• Harry Potter
  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Sorcerer's Stone in the United States)
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
  • Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (co-wrote the story with John Tiffany and Jack Thorne as the basis for Thorne's script)
• The Casual Vacancy
• Cormoran Strike Novels as Robert Galbraith:
  • The Cuckoo's Calling
  • The Silkworm
  • Career of Evil

Outside of the Harry Potter story arc, but set in the same franchise, she wrote three books for which all proceeds are donated to charity:

• Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, under the pen name Newt Scamander.
• Quidditch Through the Ages, under the pen name Kennilworthy Whisp.
• The Tales of Beedle the Bard, released in December 2008, but before it was released Rowling made seven copies which were hand-written by her and given to her close friends, save one, which was auctioned for charity.
• Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (the screenplay was published in hardcover in late 2016)
• unnamed sequel to Fantastic Beasts

Rowling's biography is quite famous — the Potter-related details of it, at least. The first idea for Harry Potter "fell into her head" as she was riding on a train, and the idea seized her — but she had nothing to write on and was too shy to ask a stranger to loan some paper. However, early into the writing process on Philosopher's Stone, Rowling's mother passed away, which "changed her world and Harry's forever", intensifying Harry's feelings of being orphaned. Further intensifying Harry's loneliness is the fact that Rowling was very poor when she began writing — she and her baby girl lived on food stamps, at a time of high government cuts. The image of Rowling writing in a café with her baby at her side is one born of necessity — her apartment had no heating, but the café did.

After that, history took its course. Harry Potter is one of the biggest brands in existence today; in an age of The Internet, Video Games and mass Television saturation, Harry made reading cool again. This may be Jo Rowling's most important contribution of all.

Rowling has a very distinctive Signature Style (though apparently she's also good at hiding it). If you're reading one of her books, expect a story set 20 Minutes into the Past with an Intro-Only Point of View, a Plot-Triggering Death, Loads and Loads of Characters with Meaningful Names (just don't get too attached to them), Said Bookisms, plenty of lampshaded Narm, and plenty of Foreshadowing for her overstuffed Chekhov's Armory.

Her next novel was The Casual Vacancy, released on 27 September 2012. It is not a Harry Potter book and was marketed as her "first novel for adults." After mixed reviews, Rowling followed up with the hardboiled crime novel The Cuckoo's Calling, with the added twist that she used a pseudonym, Robert Galbraith, and managed to stay under the radar for four months until she was outed. Its sequel, The Silkworm was published in 2014, still under her pseudonym.

On 12 September 2013 Warner Bros. announced they will produce a new series of Harry Potter Spin-Off films based on Rowling's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them with the book's fictional author Newt Scamander as the protagonist. It takes place in the same world as Harry Potter but set 70 years before the events of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Rowling wrote the screenplay for the first film.

She ended at #83 in One Hundred Greatest Britons.

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Media portrayals

• Appeared as herself on The Simpsons.
• Played by Jennifer Saunders for Comic Relief 2003: The Big Hair Do.
• Played by Amy Poehler in a Saturday Night Live sketch following the Word of Gay on Dumbledore. Awesome as Amy Poehler is, she's... not good at doing a British accent.
• Played by Chad Morgan in one of Robot Chicken's "Dicks with Time Machine" sketches, in which one of the title time travelers tries to prevent her from writing the Harry Potter series.
• The subject of a Made For TV Biopic in which she was played by Poppy Montgomery. Sadly, it was made by the Lifetime network, but remarkably was not as bad as it could have been and Poppy KILLS the role, capturing a lot of the eccentric mannerisms and touches to Rowling's character that come through in interviews. Also the original title was scrapped in favor of Magic Beyond Words: The J. K. Rowling Story, apparently because Strange Magic just didn't sound Lifetime-y enough. Oddly enough, the movie seems much more like typical Hallmark fare, though markedly better than most TV movies.

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Associated tropes

• Adam Westing: Mildly in her brief appearance on The Simpsons. To date, this is the only time Rowling has played herself in any fictional context, granted it was just two voice-over lines.
  Lisa: Can you tell me what happens at the end of the series?
  Rowling: (exasperated) He grows up and marries you. Is that what you want to hear?
  Lisa: (dreamily) Yes.
• Author Avatar: Hermione is based off her when she was younger. Apparently, she split her personality into three parts when designing the Golden Trio, but Hermione is the one with the most aspects of her personality, according to Word of God.
  • Robin Ellacott is based on her early adult self, again courtesy of Word of God.
• Black Comedy: All her novels are full of this.
• Blunt "Yes": At least she apologized.
  F.A.Q.: Are you going to kill any more characters?
  Rowling: Yes. Sorry.
• Celeb Crush: In Conversations with J. K. Rowling, she mentions that as a kid she had crushes on Dustin Hoffman, after seeing him in Little Big Man, and Davy Jones of The Monkees.
• Cluster F-Bomb: In all of her adult novels to date. Almost every other word.
• Compensating for Something: Her response to a Twitter troll:
  "The Internet doesn’t just offer opportunities for misogynistic abuse, you know. Penis enlargers can also be bought discreetly."
• Country Matters: Oddly enough, she's extraordinarily versatile with the word "cunt", especially in The Casual Vacancy. Though it should be noted that, while it's still a strong curse word, "cunt" isn't as profane in the UK as it is in the States.
• Deadpan Snarker: It's obvious where many of her characters get it.
• Dear Negative Reader: While Rowling has largely embraced the fandom of Harry Potter, she has gone on record of disliking the invokedMisaimed Fandom that Draco Malfoy had developed, and is uncomfortable with the more lewd fanfictions.
• Deuteragonist: All of her work since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has focused on more than one central character (even her expansions to the Potter universe).
• Doorstopper: All of her work between Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Career of Evil was at least 400 pages long. The streak was finally broken with the published script for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (304 pages); though this is justified by it being a film script rather than a novel, and 300+ pages is still extremely hefty for a script.
• Former Teen Rebel: As a teenager, Rowling had a penchant for leather jackets and heavy eyeshadow, even with her school uniform, and put up a tough girl exterior to deal with school bullies and her mothers declining health at home.
• Genre Shift: Subverted. It would seem that going from magical Boarding School books aimed primarily at younger readers to Crime Fiction novels for adults is a big leap. However, considering Rowling's escalating Darker and Edgier tone and her love of Red Herrings, The Summation, and all things Chekhov, it was a very organic, almost inevitable transition. The Casual Vacancy, with its much lower stakes and Rotating Protagonist, is a much straighter example, and is something of an Oddball in her oeuvre.
• Homage: Writing under her post-Potter synonym as "Robert Galbraith", she revealed in a BBC interview in November 2015 that she is a fan of the Blue Öyster Cult. "Robert Galbraith"'s novel Career Of Evil is heavily inspired by a BOC song of the same title and she admitted to loading the book with a lot of ShoutOuts to other lyrics and songs by this band.
• I Just Write the Thing: Rowling often tells us that she only kills off characters she likes because the plot demands it.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: Her name was the subject of one.
  Q: How did Harry Potter get to the bottom of the hill?
  A: He walked. (jk, rolling)
• Irony: Ian Rankin once predicted that Rowling would make a great crime novelist due to her strong themes surrounding death and mortality, as well as having Characters Dropping Like Flies yet still making their deaths meaningful. Then Rowling released her first crime novel, which has her second-lowest body count of her works, beaten only by Prisoner of Azkaban where Everybody Lives.
• Lies to Children: Not maliciously, of course, but if the truth would be unnecessarily harsh for small kids. Compare her example on that page (regarding Aberforth and his goats) and the Adam Westing and Blunt "Yes" examples on this page.
• Mathematician's Answer: She's fond of giving them to avoid spoilers, like reciting the physical dimensions of her next book when asked to describe it.
• Moustache de Plume: She actually doesn't even have a middle name. She added the "K" (after her grandmother Kathleen) when Bloomsbury asked her to use her initials, their thinking being that the name "Joanne Rowling" would make boys hesitant to read or buy the book.
  • Played even more straight with The Cuckoo's Calling which she published as "Robert Galbraith"
• No Pronunciation Guide: Her name is pronounced like "bowling", not like "howling", although nearly everyone makes that mistake (including news presenters) until they hear it from the Word of God.
  • She also pronounces "Voldemort" with a silent "t", but she admits she's probably the only person who does this.
    • This makes sense, as it is the french phrase "Vol de Mort," which translates literally to "Flight from Death." Jim Dale also used this pronunciation of his name until Philosopher's Stone had it pronounced with the hard T.
• Shown Their Work: Before she wrote Harry Potter, she once worked as researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International in London. Rowling herself once said in her commencement speech at Harvard that it gave her a look into various human abuse, a theme that is prevalent in Comoran Strike books.
• Take That!: Gave a playful one to Stephen Fry. When Fry was recording the audiobook for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, he had trouble pronouncing the phrase "Harry pocketed it." Finally he phoned Rowling to ask if she could revise the book to say "Harry put it in his pocket." Rowling considered a moment and replied "No"— and then included the phrase "Harry pocketed it" word for word in each of the next four books of the series.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: As she admits. Mostly it's dating inconsistencies which make it hard for fans to construct a timeline of the series. The number of students in Hogwarts is also a point of contention. As are the House points added up at the end of each schoolyear.
  • In a related sense (maybe Writers Cannot Do Geography,) she also said the reason the staircases moved around in Hogwarts was because she knew she couldn't remember where everything goes and used that as a way to smooth it over.
    • The latter is strongly averted in the Cormoran Strike novels; many of the London places, especially pubs (such as the Tottenham and the Cambridge, two of the pubs nearest Strike's fictional office) are real and in their correct locations.
  • As is the former — in The Silkworm, the days of the week match up with the dates listed, real life events that are referenced occur on the correct dates, and even the exact celebrities on magazine covers from nearly four years before the book was published are accurate (with the exception of a cover featuring one fictional character).

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