ROWLING, J.K.

“Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.”

Joanne Rowling is a British novelist best known for the impact on children’s literature her Harry Potter series had. She was working as a researcher and secretary for Amnesty International when she reportedly conceived the idea of a boy wizard and his magical school and in the seven years that it took for the first book in the series to be published, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997), she experienced relative poverty, divorce, the death of her mother and the birth of her first child. The series is seven books long and she has subsequently added a stage play and an additional series of films to the Harry Potter canon. In 2004, Rowling was named by Forbes as the first person to become a US-dollar millionaire by writing books. Rowling has also turned her hand at adult fiction with The Casual Vacancy and then in the Cormoran Strike crime series published under the name Robert Galbraith.