J K Rowling - Omnibus

Now an exclusive journey into the magical world of Harry Potter, speaking in depth on television for the first time ever. His creator J.K. Rowling speaks to BBC One. He'll be famous, a legend. I wouldn't be surprised if today was known as Harry Potter Day in future. There will be books written about Harry. Every child in our world will know his name. When J.K. Rowling wrote these words in the opening pages of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, she never in her wildest dreams thought they'd come true. Harry Potter has become the biggest publishing success the world has ever seen. Since 1997, more than 135 million copies have been sold in 48 different languages. Only the Bible has more translations. Every 30 seconds, someone somewhere in the world begins a Harry Potter story. I think I would have been clinically insane to have expected what's happened. Who could have predicted this? No one knew. And I certainly didn't. Just a few years ago, J.K. Rowling was broke and jobless. A single mother who spent her afternoons writing in Edinburgh coffee shops while her baby slept. Today, she's famous and rich, the most celebrated children's author in the world. She's created four international bestsellers. The first Harry Potter movie is a blockbuster success, and legions of fans are desperate for the next installment of the boy wizard's adventures. But it's J.K. Rowling's story that's the most amazing of all. Only now has she agreed to tell it in her own words. A lot of rubbish has been written. Not necessarily malicious rubbish, but things get exaggerated and distorted, and I just thought maybe the moment has come just to say how it happened, truthfully, and then I can at least go easy to my bed and think, well, the truth is out there, and people can take it or leave it. Harry's arrival on the doorstep of his muggle relatives the Dursleys in the first book is the start of an epic magical journey. Harry grows up thinking he's just an ordinary boy, until he finds out that in the wizard world his name is Legendary, and he's destined to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Then Harry's adventures really begin, as he and his classmates Hermione and Ron battle with the dark forces of magic, a story J.K. Rowling has meticulously planned to tell over seven books, one for each school year. It was a journey that began back in 1990. I was going by train from Manchester to London, sitting there thinking of nothing to do with writing, and the idea came out of nowhere. I could see Harry very clearly, this scrawny little boy, and it was the most physical rush of excitement. I'd never felt that excited about anything to do with writing. I'd never had an idea that gave me such a physical response, so I'm ramaging through this bag to try and find a pen or a pencil or anything. I didn't even have an eyeliner on me, so I just had to sit and think, and for four hours, because the train was delayed, I had all these ideas bubbling up through my head. Harry was small and skinny, with brilliant green eyes and jet black hair that was always untidy. He wore round glasses, and on his forehead was a thin lightning-shaped scar. It was this scar that made Harry so particularly unusual, even for a wizard. This scar was the only hint of Harry's very mysterious past, of the reason he had been left on the Dursley's doorstep 11 years before. I can't describe the excitement to someone who doesn't write books, except to say it was that incredibly elated feeling you get when you've just met someone with whom you might eventually fall in love. That was the kind of feeling I had getting off the train, as though I'd just met someone wonderful, and we were about to embark on this wonderful affair. That kind of elation, that light-headedness and that excitement, and so I got back to my flat in Clapham Junction and started writing, and I've now been writing for 10 years, so it's been a good affair. For me, King's Cross is a very, very romantic place, probably the most romantic station, purely because my parents met here, so that's always been part of my childhood folklore. My dad had just joined the Navy, my mum had just joined the Wrens, they were both travelling up to Arbroath in Scotland, from London, and they met on the train pulling out of King's Cross. So I wanted Harry to go to Hogwarts by train, I just love trains, I'm a bit nerdy like that, and obviously, therefore, it had to be King's Cross. Excuse me, sir, can you tell me where I might find platform nine and three quarters? Nine and three quarters? Think you're being funny, do you? Like a lot in the Harry Potter books, it was reality with a twist. I wanted to find another entrance to the magical world, but I didn't want a kind of time warp thing. I like the entrances to be places that you can only find if you have the knowledge, so anyone who ran at the barrier with enough confidence would be able to break through onto this platform, between platform nine and platform ten. Best do it at a bit of a run if you're nervous. Good luck. I wrote platform nine and three quarters when I was living in Manchester, and I wrongly visualised the platforms, and I was actually thinking of Euston. So anyone who's actually been to the real platforms nine and ten in King's Cross will realise they don't bear a great resemblance to the platforms nine and ten as described in the book, so that's just me coming clean there. I was in Manchester, I couldn't check. It was five years from the train journey where I had the original idea to finishing the book, and during those five years, this mass of material was generated, some of which will never find its way into the book, will never need to be in the books. It's just stuff I need to know for my own pleasure, partly for my own pleasure and partly because I like reading a book where I have the sense that the author knows everything. They might not be telling me everything, but you have that confidence that the author really knows everything. Okay, so this is, to the untrained eye, might look like a pile of waste paper, but this is ten years' work. As you can see, I file meticulously, and I know where every single piece of paper is, but I've dragged out a few bits and pieces. So this is the name of everyone in Harry's year, and all these little symbols mean what house they're in, how magical they are, what their parentage is, because I needed this later for the Death Eaters and so on, and the various allegiances that would be set up within the school. I like this. This was 98, and this was me trying to find words for the Dementors, so I have all these Latin words written all over the inside of my diary. I used to cover just about anything with writing, as you can see. This is my application for housing benefit in 28 Gardeners Crescent, which is the first place I lived, obviously, when I was in Edinburgh. Treated with a complete lack of respect by me. Discarded first chapters of book one, I reckon I must have got through 15 different alternative chapters of book one. The reasons for which I discarded each of them were they all gave too much away, and in fact, if you put all those discarded first chapters together, almost the whole plot is explained. This is an old notebook in which I worked out, and again, I don't want you to come too close on this. That is the history of the Death Eaters. Where's my Portuguese diary gone? There it is. So this is a Portuguese diary, as you can see, not filled in, because I've never filled in a diary in my life, but it had paper in it to write on, so we have another draft of book one, chapter one. I drew a lot of pictures. I drew them for no one but me. I just wanted to know what what the characters looked like. So anyway, that was Argus Filch. No prizes. Snape, obviously. That is Harry arriving in Privet Drive with Professor McGonagall and Hagrid and Dumbledore. That was a Gringotts cart. Mirror of Erised. That's the Wheezes. Professor Sprout. I like this one. I thought I'd lost this picture, actually, because I was going to show it to Chris Columbus, and true to form, I only found it when it was no use, and they'd already filmed that bit anyway, but this is how the entrance to Diagon Alley works in my imagination. So Chris is going to murder me when he finds out I had a blueprint all along, and he was asking me how it worked, but it was buried in a box. Welcome, Harry, to Diagon Alley. It felt as though I was carving a book out of this mass of notes, and that's in effect what I did. It was a question of condensing and editing and sculpting a book out of this mass of stuff that I had on Harry, and I thought that if it got published, I really thought it's a book for obsessives. It's a book for the kind of people who enjoy every little tiny detail about the world, because I have every little tiny detail about the world. A History of Magic by Batilda Bagshot. Magical Theory by Adalbert Woffley. A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration by Emerick Switch. One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi by Phyllida Spaw. Magical Drafts and Potions by Arsenius Jigger. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by Newt Scamander. The Dark Forces, a Guide to Self-Protection by Quentin Trimble. Other Equipment. One Wand. One Cauldron. Pewter, standard size two. One set glass or crystal files. One telescope. One set brass scales. Students may also bring an owl, or a cat, or a toad. As J.K. Rowling continued to build Harry's world, her own fell apart. She arrived in Edinburgh in 1993 after a brief spell teaching English in Portugal. There she'd married, had a baby, and then left her husband. She had no job, no money, and a tiny daughter to support. That was the phase where the Penalist Single Mother sort of tag to my name came along, which was true, but it wasn't enough that I was a Penalist Single Mother. I had to write on napkins because I couldn't afford paper, and then we started straying into the realms of the ridiculous. Let's not exaggerate here. Let's not pretend I had to write on napkins because I didn't. They started sort of adding little bits and pieces that just weren't necessary because the start reality was bad enough. I haven't been back here since 1994 when I moved out, and I don't like being back here, which is no offense to the place, but I've kind of avoided this place since I moved out, just in deference to the fact that it was a pretty unhappy six months. I did a lot of writing here. I would say it's here that really the first book became a book, as opposed to three chapters and a collection of notes. So are we going to go in then? Go. You couldn't really, objectively speaking, look around and say, well, you've made a success of your life. I was 28. I was living on benefit, living on about £70 a week. I had no work, and to suddenly be in a position where actually I couldn't support myself, because obviously anyone who's tried to get state childcare will know that you'll be very lucky to get the kind of childcare that means you can work even part-time. So it's all a real shock to the system. Oh my god. This is so different. Oh my god. Oh wow. This is so, so different to how it was when I was here. This is nice. And I'm really glad. You just expect time to stand still when you've walked away from the place, and I should know better, but I have just been, every time I've come anywhere near this place or passed it in a bus or a taxi, I've imagined it exactly as it was when I when I lived here, and it's, it's all been, I would be delighted to live here. This is great actually. It is, it's like an exorcism. Everything was just very, very, very dilapidated. Always filthy, which wasn't the flat's fault, was normally my fault, because people very often say to me, how did you do it? How did you raise a baby and write a book? And the answer is, I didn't do housework for four years. I'm not superwoman, and living in squalor, that was the answer. Memories of this time definitely created the Dementors. Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places. They glory in decay and despair. They drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them. Even muggles feel their presence, though they can't see them. Get too near a Dementor, and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. They are kind of depression personified. I was quite depressed at that point. I still think they are the most frightening thing I've written. During the day, I was writing in cafes, as everyone famously knows. But could I just say, for the record, once and for all, because it's really irritating me. I did not write in cafes to escape my unheated flat, because I am not stupid enough to rent an unheated flat in Edinburgh in midwinter. It had heating. I went out and wrote in cafes because the way to make Jessica fall asleep was to keep her moving in the pushchair. So I used to take her out, tire her out, put her in the pushchair, walk her along the moment she fell asleep into the nearest cafe and write. So this is Nicholson's, where I wrote huge parts of the book. This was a really great place to write, because there are so many tables around here that I didn't feel too guilty about taking a table up for too long. And that was my favourite table. I always wanted to try and get that one, because it was out of the way in the corner. It was just great to look up when you were writing and stop and think about things and be able to look out on the street, which was quite busy. They were pretty tolerant of me in here, partly because one of the owners is my brother-in-law. And I used to say to them, well, you know, if it's published, I'll try and get you loads of publicity. And it was all just a big joke. No one ever dreamt for a moment that was going to happen. To muster the willpower to keep going with no promise of publication, obviously I must have really believed in the story. And I did. I really believed in it. But it was more a feeling of, I have to do right by this book. I have to give it my best shot. But at the same time, my realistic side was reminding me that a completely unknown author always has a struggle to get published. And who knew, just because I thought it was so great, there was no guarantee that anyone else would like it. J.K. Rowling sent off her manuscript and got herself a literary agent, only to find that publishing houses threw Harry on the reject pile. At the very beginning, we were very excited about it in the agency, but it was a very difficult book to sell. And quite a large number of publishers turned it down. It was too long. It doubled on your way to school, which is something that was regarded as being not politically correct. Well, of course, everybody now denies turning it down and want to distance themselves from this terrible, terrible error. Is it nice to name names? You're nodding, but I don't think it's very nice to name names. It was all the major publishers we know. Among them, Puffin and Collins, for sure. It's like turning down The Beatles, isn't it? The very first question she asked me was, how do you feel about sequels? And then she told me the entire story of Harry Potter all through the entire series. I realized, of course, that she knew exactly about this world and where it was going, who it was going to include, how the character would develop. And of course, it was fascinating, because this doesn't normally happen. Children's book characters don't grow up in real time normally. They're locked in the time they are, and the sequels are endless reruns of the same kind of adventures. But to have a character developing in real time as his age developed was a really interesting idea. I gave Joe one memorable piece of advice. After our first lunch together, we were sitting down, and I said, the important thing, Joe, is for you to keep your real job. Barry said, and Christopher, my agent, also said to me, children's authors really don't make any money. They both of them were at pains to say to me, you know, we really like the book, but, you know, it's not that commercial. Bloomsbury Publishing acquired what would become the biggest phenomenon in modern literature for just £2,500. That was second to the birth of my daughter, the best moment of my life. Christopher phoned me up on a Friday afternoon, and he said Joe's speeches certainly for at least the period of time it takes to build up enough steam for a big screen, I think. And he said, are you all right? Are you still there? And I said, well, it's just that my only lifetime ambition has just been fulfilled, and I was the best moment. Nothing since has come anywhere close to the fact that I was actually going to be in print. It was going to be an actual book in a bookshop. The best moment of my life. Went into Waterstones on Princess Street in Edinburgh, and there I was between Ransom and someone else. You know, I was just there on the R shelf, just like any other author. It was incredible. And I had this urge to sneak one off and sign it and put it back on, but I thought, you know, someone would tell me off for graffitiing books. I didn't have a credit card or anything at that point, you see, these practical things, so I had no proof I was me. I couldn't think how I would explain it away, so I didn't. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone tells of Harry's introduction to the magical world. Not only is he a wizard, but a famous one at that. He's renowned as the miraculous survivor of a brutal attack by the evil wizard Voldemort, who murdered his parents. Through his adventures at Hogwarts, he begins to find out the mysteries of his past. The orphan is an excellent protagonist for any story, because they're free and yet they're bereft. They're bereft of what gives a child most of the sense of who he or she is and where they come from and where they belong. So they're cut adrift in some strange way. They have this great need, because we all need to know where we've come from and we need to find where we will eventually belong. Difficult, very difficult. Plenty of courage, I see. Not a bad mind either. There's talent, oh yes, and a thirst to prove yourself. But where to put you? Not Slytherin, not Slytherin. Not Slytherin, eh? When he first arrives at school, he's totally unsure. He has the feelings we all have as adults as well, when you enter a new place and you don't know what's going on, but greatly exaggerated obviously by the fact that he is set apart even there by his fame and his ancestry and this curious clerk that meant that he survived this, what should have been a fatal attack. He's every boy, but with a twist. J.K. Rowling's mixture of the everyday and the magical, the matter of fact and the mystical, permeates her books. I think that the world of Hogwarts, or my magical world, my community of wizards, it's like the real world in a very distorted mirror. We're not going off to a different planet, we're not going through time warps. It is a fantastic world that has to live shoulder to shoulder with the real world. I think what I liked in the first about Harry Potter was that mix of, I won't say fantasy, because I always think that is a dirty word, and fantasy doesn't really work unless it's grounded in reality, and it's the reality that appealed to me in a sense. What's woven into them is a true history of the English folkloric tradition of magic. She hasn't made up a magic world which is simply a great wish list of Disney-esque fantasy of what if you have a dream it's going to come true, because Harry Potter doesn't present a world like that. It's connected and it comes out of the whole fabric of English history and folkloric mythology, and I'm not in a high literary genre that she herself, I'm sure, wouldn't claim to belong to. It's merely that that's why it works, because things don't work if they are a result of a feeble-minded fantasy. Magic is perennially fascinating. There will always be books about magic because it's deeply, deeply, deeply ingrained in all of us. In all societies, the world over, magic came first, and we still sophisticated as we think ourselves now. I think the appeal of the idea that I can do something that will influence this large, scary environment in which I have to exist. The dream of being able to become a wizard and control the environment is still enormous for adults as well as children. You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-making, he began. He spoke in barely more than a whisper, but they caught every word. Like Professor McGonagall, Snape had the gift of keeping a class silent without effort. As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don't expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly-simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses. I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stop a death. I don't believe in witchcraft, though I've lost count of the number of times I've been told I'm a practicing witch. 90, let's say 95 percent at least of the magic in the books is entirely invented by me, and I've used things from folklore and I've used bits of what people used to believe worked magically just to add a certain flavor, but I've always twisted them to suit my own ends. I mean, I've taken liberties with folklore to suit my plot. Witches and wizards are a huge part of children's literature. It'll never go away. I don't think it will ever, ever, ever go away. 100 years, 200 years time, there'll be another kind of wizard story. By 1997, J.K. Rowling had moved on to the second book in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Book one was doing well, but nowhere near its popularity today, and J.K. Rowling was making her living as a teacher. Then something happened that would change her world forever. Harry cast a spell across the Atlantic, and American publishers got caught up in a bidding war for the book. My boss would say, okay, do you love it? I'd say, yes, I love it. Okay, stay in the auction. Do you love it this many dollars? Yeah. I kept saying yes. I just was getting more and more nervous, because at the end of the day, this is more money than I had ever paid any author as an advance, let alone an advance for a first novel. It was unprecedented. She said, do you love it $105,000? And I said, yes, yes. She said, well, go ahead and make that offer, and that was it. The deal with Scholastic meant that at last J.K. Rowling could fulfill her lifelong ambition to become a full-time writer. As soon as I knew that people wrote books, they didn't just arrive, I don't know, out of nowhere, like plants. I knew that's what I wanted to do. I can't ever remember not wanting to be a writer. It's a bit mysterious to me as well. And yet, it isn't mysterious to me. You see, I can't honestly understand why you don't want to be a writer. I can't understand why the whole world doesn't want to be a writer. What's better than it? Unless you can really, really, really remember what it felt like to be a child, you've really got no business writing for children. Even if people hate the books and I qualify on no other count, then I definitely qualify on that one, because I remember so vividly what it felt like to be that age. J.K. Rowling's memories of her childhood have had a big influence on her writing. She was born in 1965 in Chipping Sodbury, and grew up near Bristol with her parents Anne and Peter, and her younger sister Di. She admits to being bookish and bossy as a child, not unlike one of Harry's best friends. Wingardium Leviosa. Stop, stop, stop. You're going to take someone's eye out. Besides, you're saying it wrong. It's Leviosa, not Leviosa. You do it, then, if you're so clever. When I started to write Hermione, when I actually got hold of a pen, she came incredibly easily, largely because she's me. Go on, go on. Wingardium Leviosa. I was swotty, and I had that, you know, sense of insecurity underneath. Tried to compensate for that by getting everything right all the time, and like Hermione, I projected a false confidence, which I know was very irritating to people at times, but underneath it all, I felt completely and utterly inadequate, which is why I completely understand Hermione. Even as a young child, J.K. Rowling loved to write, completing her first book at the age of six. The first finished book I did was a book called Rabbit, about a rabbit called Rabbit, thereby revealing the imaginative approach to names that has stood me in such good stead ever since, and I wrote the Rabbit stories for ages, to the point where a series of books about Rabbit, which were very dull, illustrated by the author. The one book I could say that specifically influenced my work was The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Cooge. She always listed the exact food they were eating. Wherever you were in the book, whenever they had a meal, you knew exactly what was in the sandwiches, and I just remember finding that so satisfying as a child. Were shelves upon shelves of the most succulent looking sweets imaginable. Creamy chunks of nougat, shimmering pink squares of coconut ice, fat honey-coloured toffees, hundreds of different kinds of chocolate in neat rows. There was a large barrel of every flavour beans, and another of fizzing whizzbees, the levitating sherbet balls that Ron had mentioned. As I moved into my teens, I was into very dramatic, gritty realism, entirely influenced by Barry Hines and Kez. Unfortunately, I didn't live in a northern town. My urban landscape wasn't very developed, because I lived in Chepstow, in the middle of a lot of fields, and it's quite hard to be a disaffected urban youth in the middle of a muddy field. So this is a cottage, obviously, where I lived from the age of nine. My bedroom's furthest on the right, and I spent an awful lot of time in that bedroom right here. I have very happy memories of this place, quite emotional being back here actually, because I've only once been, because my dad left this house shortly after my mother died, so I've only once been back here since my mum died. I remember hanging out of my bedroom window, smoking behind the curtains late at night. My father will not be happy to hear that. I wasn't very clever about that either, because I used to leave the cigarette, the cigarette ends were you know, below the window. I mean, oh yeah, someone from the pub dad's been throwing them into the garden again. You've got our house, the church, and the school in a little row. Tutsow is not a very big place at all, it's tiny. So it was a very short walk, half asleep from home to school every morning. I was still late, to my mother's eternal despair. I'm late for absolutely everything. Put your hand up if you've read one of the Harry Potter books. All those people! Now this morning, we have a very special guest in school with us today. Her name is JK Rowling, and she's here to talk to us. Hello, hello again. I don't want to step on you, stay exactly where you are. Hello, how are you? This is absolutely amazing for me to be back here. You know this is where I went to school. It's been really, really wonderful to come back. Nothing is more fun to me than meeting the children who read the books. What could possibly make me happier than to think that children started reading for the first time in Harry Potter? Some children, obviously there's still huge bookworms out there for whom Harry is another book, but I have met a lot of children actually who have said that Harry introduced them really to the pleasures of reading. What advice could you give us young authors? Would you like to be a writer? Maybe. Read as much as you can. I'd say read anything. The more you read, the better, because it will teach you what you like and what you think makes good writing, and it will increase your vocabulary. And then you'll just have to keep on and on writing, and you'll find that you hate most of what you write at first, but sooner or later you'll write something you quite like, and lots of trees will have to die because you'll be crumpling everything up. What Hogwarts house would you like to be in? I definitely want to be in Gryffindor. That's why I put Harry there. What were your memories of being at Tuts Hill School? I really liked it here, but my first teacher really, really frightened me. Her name was Mrs Morgan, and she used to sit us all in class according to how clever she thought we were, and my first day at school she had a two-minute chat with me and she put me in the stupid row, which is about the nastiest thing I can think of a teacher doing. It's not my favourite teacher, Mrs Morgan. Then I went on to Wydean down the road, where half of you got brothers and sisters, haven't you? It was at Wydean that I met Sean, which has been a very important friendship in my life, a huge friendship in my life. I always felt a bit of an outsider, and that might perhaps explain why Sean and I were so close, because he came in late. Like me, he didn't have the local accent, and so I think to an extent we both felt like outsiders in the place, and that probably formed quite a big bond between us. So this is Sean, to whom the second Harry Potter book is dedicated, and Ron owes a fair bit to Sean. I never set out to describe Sean in Ron, but Ron has a Sean-ish turn of phrase. Made it. Can you imagine the looking on McGonagall's face if we were late? That was bloody brilliant. Oh, thank you for that assessment, Mr Weasley. I suppose the similarities are that he's not, he's never quite first eleven, but he's on the verges of being first eleven, and I think, if I, no. If I may, Joe, sorry. I was going to say, academically, for example, in school, it was quite clear that Joe was, I'm not going to be embarrassing aside, was first eleven, and I was very definitely hanging on the coattails there, boring essays occasionally, and I think with the Ron character, I think what comes through, to me anyway, maybe I've misinterpreted it, is that he's always there or thereabouts well intentioned. He's always there when you need him. That's Ron Weasley. Sean was the first of my friends to pass his driving test, and he had this old Ford Anglia, clapped out Ford Anglia, turquoise and white, which is now quite famous as the car that the That car was freedom to us. My heart still lifts when I see an old Ford Anglia, which is a bit sad. It was as though they had been plunged into a fabulous dream. This, thought Harry, was surely the only way to travel. Past swirls and turrets of snowy cloud, in a car full of hot bright sunlight, with a fat pack of toffees in the glove compartment, and the prospect of seeing Fred and George's jealous faces when they landed smoothly and spectacularly on the sweeping lawn in front of Hogwarts Castle. He was the coolest man in school. He had a turquoise Ford Anglia, and you were pretty cutting edge, I think. I was in those days, yeah. It's all gone horribly wrong since. Spandau Valley haircut, sorry. And of an evening, she'd phone up and say, come pick me up, and I'd drive down there, and we'd head off somewhere else in the car. And sit under the Severn Bridge. Sit under the Severn Bridge, or elsewhere. And discuss life, and drink. It's a very sad life, isn't it? This was what we thought was exciting when we were 17. We used to sit down here in a Ford Anglia. Yeah, those urban kids, they don't know what they miss. J.K. Rowling escaped to university in Exeter, earning a degree in French and Classics before moving to London. Then a bombshell hit. Her mother, Anne, had been battling with multiple sclerosis for a decade, when the disease took her life. Mum dying was like this death charge in my life. The pain of her going and just missing such a huge part of her life. She was 45 when she died, which is far too young to die. Far too young to leave your family. Never knew what we all ended up doing, and so on. For mum, there would have been a particular glory in being a writer, because she was the real book lover. And so, it does add a little bit of poison to the life, if you like. The one thing that I think she really would have prized, she never did. Perhaps two or three days after I had the idea for Harry. I disposed of his parents in quite a brutal way. It didn't read in a cruel way, but I mean, it was very cut and dry, nothing lingering, no debate about how it had happened. And at that stage, no real discussion of how painful that was going to be. Of course, mum died six months after I'd written my first attempt at an open chapter. And that made an enormous difference, because I was living it. I was living what I'd just written. The Mirror of Erised is absolutely entirely drawn from my own experience of losing a parent. Five more minutes, just please God, give me five more minutes. It'd never be enough. Mum? After five minutes of telling her all about Jesse, because she has a grandchild, and obviously she never saw, and then I'd be trying to tell her about the books, and then I'd realise that I hadn't asked her what's it like to be dead. Fairly significant question. But I can well imagine that happening. But it would never be long enough. That was the point of chapter 10. You know, it's a tough rule in the living, and you've just got to get past it. Death is an extremely important theme throughout all seven books. I would say possibly the most important theme. If you are writing about evil, which I am, and if you are writing about someone who's essentially a psychopath, you have a duty to show the real evil of taking human life. What is this magic? More people are going to die. And, well, there's at least one death that is going to be horrible to write, to rewrite actually, because it's already written. But it has to be. Indeed, some parents have questioned whether children can cope with the darker side of the books. It's very interesting how parents think that they have the right to dictate to you, because you're writing, reading materials for their children. I got a horrible letter on book two. Very, very stuffy letter from the mother saying, this was a very disturbing ending, and I'm sure a writer of your ability will be able to think of a better way to end the next book. So basically, liked it till two thirds of the way through, but if you could really address this issue in the future, and I'll be back in touch if I find you unacceptable. And it was at that point I snapped, and I wrote back and said, don't read the rest of the books. Yours sincerely, Jo Roan. There's no point. I mean, there's no point. I'm not taking dictation here. Do I care about my readers profoundly and deeply? But do I ultimately think that they should dictate a single word of what I write? No. No, I am the only one who should be in control of that. And I'm not writing to make anyone's children feel safe. She's a tough writer. She won't compromise on what she sees as being right, just in order to worry about what might frighten her. I think it's a function of literature to give children nightmares, just as it's a function of, you know, the biological world to give them measles, because if they don't get their nightmares when they're 12, they don't wrestle with the dread of the unknown. Then when it comes later in life, that's when you're really in for trouble, just as mumps at 30 is a much bigger deal than mumps at eight. So you're kind of doing your children a favour. Once I was in bed reading and it's quite scary when Voldemort's, like, appearing and I was, like, all hunched up in bed. I was like, what's going to happen? What's going to happen? You just keep reading, don't you? Yeah. It's like when it gets really tense and you're reading in bed and then your dad comes in and goes, oh, you're going to have to stop reading at bedtime and you've got onto this really exciting bit and you're like, oh, I'd like to read the next chapter. It's cool that adults actually read it as well, not just kids. One mistake that adults used to make about children's books is to think that children's books deal with trivial things. Little things that please little minds and little concerns about little people. And so nothing could be further from the truth. Quite the contrary, it's been my observation that a lot of highly praised adult books, highly successful adult books, in recent years have dealt with the trivial things such as, does my bum look big in this? Will my favourite football team win the cup? And, oh dear, my girlfriend's left me. Whatever am I going to do? Whereas the children's books have dealt with ultimate questions. Where do we count from? What's the nature of being a human being? What must I do to be good? These are profound questions, very deeply important questions, and they're being dealt with largely not only in the books that adults read, but in the books that children read. The launch of book three, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 1999, marked J.K. Rowling's transformation from popular author to international superstar. For the first time ever, three books by the same author topped the New York Times bestseller list, and her book signings began to resemble pop concerts. I have no idea how many books I've signed, but it's got to be in the tens of thousands now. So if anyone wants to own the very last unsigned Harry Potter in existence, I sometimes feel like I should just don't get a sign. It'll be valuable one day. I never touched it. The fun when all the international editions started coming in was to see how differently they interpreted Harry. This is a funny one because this is my Italian publisher, and in the very early Philosopher's Stones that they did, they'd taken Harry's glasses off, which really annoyed me. It was as though in Italy you couldn't be a hero and wear glasses, but they put them back on now. Slightly bizarre. The rat head, don't quite understand why he's wearing a rat hat, but that's fine. Feeling oddly as though his legs had turned to lead, Harry got into line behind a boy with sandy hair, with Ron behind him, and they walked out of the chamber. It's hard to believe there was a ceiling there at all, and that the Great Hall didn't simply open onto the heavens. By the time Hoop 4 was published in summer 2000, J.K. Rowling had bewitched readers the world over. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was launched at the stroke of midnight on July the 8th, and Pottermania took hold as thousands of fans queued for hours for a copy. In Toronto, an audience of 12,000 gathered for the biggest book reading ever. J.K. Rowling was terrified. I've never been good at speaking in public, in fact it's borderline phobic, and I felt so pathetically, woefully inadequate to the task ahead, to me with my book, shaking. And I had two earplugs, so I could only very distantly hear the noise of the crowd. Delighted and terrified to be here, to be honest with you. So I did my reading, and once I was up there I was actually okay. But Dudley kept running his hand nervously over his backside, and walking... And then I finished, and I said, thank you very much, that's whatever I said, and I just wanted to hear what it actually sounded like. So I took out one of the plugs, and it was a fan, my eardrum exploded. I actually heard the noise that everyone else could hear in the stadium, it was unbelievable. If you could take me back, and you were able to tell me exactly what has happened, first off I wouldn't believe you, at all. Then if you managed to convince me of the truth, then I don't know what I would have done, because I would have thought, well I won't be able to handle that, I won't be able to cope with that. So I don't know what I would have done. I don't know. And there'll be people watching this who will never believe that, because of the money. But the reality of it has been a strange and terrible thing at times. With fame and success came the relentless attention of the world's media. Harry has to deal with the same problem in Group 4, when he meets a ruthless journalist called Rita Skeeter. She reached into her crocodile bag and drew out a long, acid-green quill and a roll of parchment, which she stretched out between them on a crate of Mrs. Scour's all-purpose magical mess remover. She put the tip of the green quill into her mouth, sucked it for a moment with apparent relish, then placed it upright on the parchment, where it stood, balanced on its point, quivering slightly. Testing. My name is Rita Skeeter, Daily Profit Reporter. Harry looked down quickly at the quill. The moment Rita Skeeter had spoken, the green quill had started to scribble, skidding across the parchment. Attractive blonde Rita Skeeter, 43, whose savage quill has punctured many inflated reputations. Lovely, said Rita Skeeter, yet again, and she ripped the top piece of parchment off, crumpled it up, and stuffed it into her handbag. Originally, Rita Skeeter turned up in book one. Harry enters the Leaky Cauldron, which is the place where he gets his very first taste of how famous he is, for the first time it hits him, and there's a very early draft of that chapter in which Rita made a beeline for him. But this gutter journalist fits better in book four, which is when the pain of fame starts to drag at Harry. Little did I know that when I came to write book four, there was a very good chance that people were going to think, aha, we know why you put Rita in there, because you've met this kind of person now and then. But then you, how ironic is it that I spent five years imagining myself into the mind of a boy who became suddenly famous. I mean, I spent five years doing that, imagining what it would be like to live in total obscurity and suddenly be famous. It's never pleasant when they go digging in areas that have absolutely no relevance to your work. I mean, there's a lot of my life that has absolutely nothing to do with Harry Potter. Journalists who shall remain nameless. I can't really think why, because I think these people should pay for their crimes. I went after my father and pursued a very horrible line of questioning with him, along the lines of, why does your daughter hate you? It was a bit of a shock for my dad as I'd just got off the phone from him. Fairly upsetting. And they came and doorstepped me. They came to my front door and started banging on the front door. And that really wrong-footed me completely, because in my total naivety, I thought, well, if I just stay at home and work, you know. And I think then I realised this isn't going to go away. And in some places, the books have sparked controversy. J.K. Rowling has become the centre of a witch hunt, with some Christian groups claiming the books promote the occult. In the American state of South Carolina, parents even tried to ban Harry from the classroom. Books, we believe, promote the religion of witchcraft, Wicca. I'm deeply concerned. I spend a lot of time in prayer, crying, because I've seen the effects of putting negative thoughts into the minds of our children. The pause is due to all the very rude things I'd like to say to these people bubbling up. And now I'll say the plight version. And the plight version is that's not true. Not once has a child come up to me and said, due to you, I've decided to devote my life to the occult. People underestimate children so hugely. They know it's fiction. When people are arguing from that kind of standpoint, I don't think reason works tremendously well. But I would be surprised if some of them had read the books at all. I'm just wild about Harry. And Harry's wild about me. The heavenly princess of his dreams. So far, nothing can cloud J.K. Rowling's success. And the long-awaited Harry Potter movie achieved the biggest opening weekend in film history. The closer the viewing came, the more frightened I became. To the point where, where I actually sat down to watch the film, I was terrified. Because I just thought, oh, please don't do anything that's not in the book. Please don't take horrible liberties with the plot. I liked it. Which was a relief, as you can imagine. Yeah, I'm happy. And Harry's journey is far from over. Fans are desperate to get their hands on the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I am loving writing book five. Harry gets to go to places in the magical world we haven't yet visited. More boy-girl stuff, inevitably. They're 15 now. Hormones working overtime. And Harry has to ask some questions that I hope the reader will think, well, why hasn't he asked that before? Harry finds out a lot more, a lot more in this book about his past. But the mystery won't finally unfold until book seven. J.K. Rowling has already written the ending. This is the thing that I was very dubious about showing you. I don't really know why, because what does this give away? But this is the final chapter of book seven. Which I'm still dubious about showing you. I don't know why I feel like the camera's going to be able to see through the folder. So this is it. And I'm not opening it, for obvious reasons. This is really where I wrap everything up. It's the epilogue. And I basically say what happens to everyone after they leave school. Those who survive. Because there are deaths, more deaths coming. It was a way of saying to myself, well, you will get it. You will get to book seven one day. And then you'll need this. So I'd just like to remind all the children I know who come round my house and start sneaking into cupboards that it's not there anymore. I don't keep it at home anymore. For very, very, very obvious reasons. So there it is. A profile of the award-winning author who created I Was a Rat, Philip Pullman. That's in half an hour on BBC Knowledge. And here on BBC One, it's EastEnders next.