“ So — back again, Harry?... You, like hundreds before you, have discovered the delights of the Mirror of Erised.”
— Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Dumbledore explains that the mirror’s magic is in its power to read the deepest desires of people’s hearts, making them return to it over and over again. Doesn’t it seem similar to how we want to keep experiencing JK Rowling’s magical world?
wLet’s pause awhile to remember how the magic began...
JK Rowling or Joanne grew up in Gloucestershire in England and in Chepstow, Gwent, in south-east Wales. Her father, Peter, was an aircraft engineer at the Rolls Royce factory and her mother, Anne, a science technician in the Chemistry department at Wyedean Comprehensive.
Young Joanne grew up surrounded by books. In an interview, she admitted, “I lived for books. I was your basic common-or-garden bookworm, complete with freckles and National Health spectacles.”
Early bird
She showed interest in writing from an early age — she wrote her first book when she was six and at 11, her first novel — about seven cursed diamonds and the people who owned them.
But what makes Joanne a popular author, apart from her ability to dole out fantastic fables, is that she’s someone you could relate to. She read widely outside her French and Classics syllabus. Little did she know that her knowledge of Classics would one day, come in handy to create the spells in the Harry Potter series, many of which are in Latin.
So, how did Harry happen? Well, he walked out of her imagination and onto a spare napkin, on a delayed train from Manchester to London in 1990. She hastily scribbled her initial Potter ideas onto that tiny scrap. Seven years and many rejections later, Harry strode out into the world, and would continue to enthral readers for a whole decade (the last book released in 2007) and beyond.
Rowling shares her birthday with the half-blood wizard — Harry James Potter, who too was born on July 31, 1980.
Magic pinpoints
Rowling was suffering from depression before Harry Potter came along. She said, Dementors were the physical manifestation of her depression.
She based the character of Snape on her math teacher.
She lived in the suburbs, just like Harry who lived with the Dursleys. And, her house had a cupboard under the stairs too.
Hermione’s Patronus was an otter, which also happens to be Rowling’s favourite animal.
The conductor and driver of the Knight Bus — Stan Shunpike and Ernie Prang — are named after her grandfathers.
