作者简介：

J. K. (Jo) Rowling was born in Chipping Sodbury in the UK in 1965. Such a funny-sounding name for a birthplace may have contributed to her talent for collecting odd names.

She was quiet, freckly, short-sighted and not very good at sports. She even broke her arm playing netball. Her favourite subject by far was English, but she also liked languages.

Jo always loved writing more than anything. 'The first story that I ever wrote down, when I was five or six, was about a rabbit called Rabbit. He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee. And ever since Rabbit and Miss Bee, I have wanted to be a writer, though I rarely told anyone so. I was afraid they'd tell me I didn't have a hope.'

As she got older, Jo kept writing but she never showed what she had written to anyone, except for some of her funny stories that featured her friends as heroines.

Jo attended the University of Exeter in Devon where she studied French. When she was 25, Jo started writing a third novel ('I abandoned the first two when I realised how bad they were'). A year later, she went to Portugal to teach English, which she really enjoyed. Working afternoons and evenings, she had mornings free to write. The new novel was about a boy who was a wizard.

When she returned to the UK, Jo had a suitcase full of stories about Harry Potter. She moved to Edinburgh with her young daughter and worked as a French teacher. She also set herself a target: she would finish the 'Harry' novel and get it published. In 1996, one year after finishing the book, Bloomsbury bought Jo's first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

'The moment I found out that Harry would be published was one of the best of my life,’ says Jo. A few months after 'Harry' was accepted for publication in Britain, an American publisher bought the rights for enough money to enable Jo to give up teaching and write full time - her life's ambition!