Although she writes under the pen name "J. K. Rowling" (pronounced rolling),[17] the author's name when her first Harry Potter book was published was simply "Joanne Rowling". Anticipating that the target audience of young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman, her publishers demanded that she use two initials, rather than her full name. As she had no middle name, she chose K as the second initial of her pen name, from her paternal grandmother.[18] She calls herself "Jo" and has said, "No one ever called me 'Joanne' when I was young, unless they were angry."[19] Following her marriage, she has sometimes used the name Joanne Murray when conducting personal business.[20][21] During the Leveson Inquiry she gave evidence under the name of Joanne Kathleen Rowling.[22] In a 2012 interview, Rowling noted that she no longer cared that people pronounced her name incorrectly.[23]
Biography

Birth and family
Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling, a Rolls-Royce aircraft engineer,[24] and Anne Rowling (née Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16*km) northeast of Bristol.[25] Her mother Anne was half-French and half-Scottish. Her parents first met on a train departing from King's Cross Station bound for Arbroath in 1964.[26] They married on 14 March 1965.[26] Her mother's maternal grandfather, Dugald Campbell, was born in Lamlash on the Isle of Arran.[27] Her mother's paternal grandfather, Louis Volant, was awarded the Croix de Guerre for exceptional bravery in defending the village of Courcelles-le-Comte during the First World War. Rowling had initially believed he had won the Légion d'honneur, as she said when she received it in 2009; however she discovered the truth on an episode of the genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?.[28][29]
Childhood and education
Rowling's sister Dianne[11] was born at their home when Rowling was 23 months old.[25] The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four.[30] She attended St Michael's Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce and education reformer Hannah More.[31][32] Her headmaster at St Michael's, Alfred Dunn, has been suggested as the inspiration for the Harry Potter headmaster Albus Dumbledore.[33]


Rowling's childhood home, Church Cottage, Tutshill.
As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would usually then read to her sister. She recalls that "I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story 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."[17] At the age of nine, Rowling moved to Church Cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Tutshill, close to Chepstow, Wales.[25] When she was a young teenager, her great aunt, who Rowling said "taught classics and approved of a thirst for knowledge, even of a questionable kind", gave her a very old copy of Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels.[34] Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.[35]
Rowling has said of her teenage years, in an interview with The New Yorker, "I wasn't particularly happy. I think it's a dreadful time of life."[24] She had a difficult homelife; her mother was ill and she had a difficult relationship with her father (she is no longer on speaking terms with him).[24] She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother had worked as a technician in the science department.[36] Rowling said of her adolescence, "Hermione [a bookish, know-it-all Harry Potter character] is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of."[37] Steve Eddy, who taught Rowling English when she first arrived, remembers her as "not exceptional" but "one of a group of girls who were bright, and quite good at English".[24] Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books. "Ron Weasley [Harry Potter's best friend] isn't a living portrait of Sean, but he really is very Sean-ish."[38] Of her musical tastes of the time, she said "My favourite group in the world is The Smiths. And when I was going through a punky phase, it was The Clash."[39] Rowling studied A Levels in English, French and German,[40] achieving two A's and a B[26] and was Head Girl.[24]
In 1982, Rowling took the entrance exams for Oxford University but was not accepted[24] and read for a BA in French and Classics at the University of Exeter, which she says was a "bit of a shock" as she "was expecting to be amongst lots of similar people*– thinking radical thoughts". Once she made friends with "some like-minded people" she says she began to enjoy herself.[41] Of her time at Exeter, Martin Sorrell, then a professor of French at the university, recalled "a quietly competent student, with a denim jacket and dark hair, who, in academic terms, gave the appearance of doing what was necessary".[24] Although her own memory is of "doing no work whatsoever" and instead she "wore heavy eyeliner, listened to the Smiths, and read Dickens and Tolkien".[24] After a year of study in Paris, Rowling graduated from Exeter in 1986[24] and moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.[42] In 1998, Rowling wrote a short-essay about her time studying Classics entitled "What was the Name of that Nymph Again? or Greek and Roman Studies Recalled", it was published by the University of Exeter's journal Pegasus.[43]
Inspiration and mother's death
After working at Amnesty International in London, Rowling and her then boyfriend decided to move to Manchester.[25] In 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into her mind.[44] She told The Boston Globe that "I really don't know where the idea came from. It started with Harry, then all these characters and situations came flooding into my head."[25][44]
Rowling described the conception of Harry Potter on her website:[45]


Rowling was on a train to King's Cross when she conceived Harry Potter. After Rowling used it as a gateway into the Wizarding World, it has since become a popular tourist spot.
I was travelling back to London on my own on a crowded train, and the idea for Harry Potter simply fell into my head. I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but I had never been so excited about an idea before. To my immense frustration, I didn't have a pen that worked, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one… I did not have a functioning pen with me, but I do think that this was probably a good thing. I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, while all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me. Perhaps, if I had slowed down the ideas to capture them on paper, I might have stifled some of them (although sometimes I do wonder, idly, how much of what I imagined on that journey I had forgotten by the time I actually got my hands on a pen). I began to write 'Philosopher's Stone' that very evening, although those first few pages bear no resemblance to anything in the finished book.
When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began to write immediately.[25][46] In December of that year, Rowling's mother died, after ten years suffering from multiple sclerosis.[25] Rowling commented, "I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter."[21] Rowling said this death heavily affected her writing[21] and that she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.[47]