The novels in the series which have succeeded it have topped bestseller lists, won numerous awards, and been translated into over sixty languages. Worldwide, the Harry Potter books have exceeded sales of million copies. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was released as a film in , adapted by Steve Kloves, and an adaptation of the second novel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets , was released in November Rowling's initial aim was to write seven books in the Harry Potter series.
The final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , was published in She has also written two small volumes which appear as the titles of Harry's school books within the novels - Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through The Ages, which were published in in aid of Comic Relief.
She was awarded an OBE for her services to children's literature in , and became an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in In she collaborated with the playwright Jack Thorne and theatre director John Tiffany; together they created the story for the two-part play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child , the script of which was written by Thorne. The supreme storytelling qualities of the books, crowded with quirky characters, developing year by school year towards a final climactic conflict between Good and Evil, the witty inventiveness and slyly satirical exchanges; all this, and much more, has vastly entertained readers of all ages and nations.
The books have had a marked impact upon the publishing industry, promoting fantasy literature for both children and adults. Perhaps their most beneficial effect has been to make reading a fashionable activity again, whether in private or public.
A less-remarked precedent is the Gothic Novel. Hogwarts after all is a place haunted by ghosts, with monsters in its bowels, moving portraits, disappearing rooms and secret passageways, plus the ever-present threat of Dark Forces. What sets J. We really must know what happens in the next chapter, the next book. The years that Rowling reputedly spent in planning the overall architecture of the story were well spent.
As author she acts as a good teacher, directing the lessons we as readers learn wizardry alongside Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione, school bully Draco Malfoy and his cronies , ending each year with a satisfying competition between rival houses or schools. Such a vast drama requires a good supporting cast: eccentric teachers Snape, Slughorn, Lupin, Trelawney and pupils variously appealing or objectionable.
The latter naturally grow up over the course of seven years from childhood into teenagers, so romantic entanglements complicate the action of the last few books. Harry himself is attracted to Cho Chang and, more lastingly, to Ginny Weasley. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child , a two-part play lasting over five hours, was based on a story by Rowling conceived in collaboration with director John Tiffany and playwright Jack Thorne.
The collaborators sitting alongside her laughed. Seventeen years, that world was mine. And for seven of those years, it was entirely mine; not a living soul knew anything about it. The dawn of the Trump era found the vocabulary of Harry Potter deployed with new urgency. Rowling, for her part, fired off insults at the new U.
Her politics had always been comfortably center left. Sometimes the analogies were more complicated, as when she cited Dumbledore to explain her opposition to a boycott of Israel. And sometimes she objected to the parallels others saw. Quote-tweeting a woman with 44 followers Rowling had at the time some 7. Corbyn, though hardly above reproach, was, notably, pro-trans-rights. He supported making gender self-identification less onerous; he would later, on occasion, introduce himself with his pronouns.
At the time, transgender rights were becoming a lightning rod in the U. The divide here between mainstream British feminists and their American counterparts is striking: American opponents of trans rights tend to be right wing. The difference reflects, perhaps, the relative insularity and homogeneity of British feminism. Fans began to note with alarm that Rowling followed vocally anti-trans Twitter accounts. Set to star in a new Fantastic Beasts movie, he stood accused of domestic abuse.
Meanwhile, Rowling undertook a new courtroom battle. She does not like them. She finds them overly-perfumed. She was staggered that [Donaldson] thought she would not be caught. Animating the Donaldson lawsuit is a sense of shocked violation — alarm at a sanctuary breached. Ever since vaulting to fame, Rowling had sought the protection of some private realm. After selling the Edinburgh house Melissa Anelli had visited, she purchased another, this one behind fast-growing hedges; they soon approached 30 feet high.
But her safest space had long been the one she found in writing. There, she knew all the secrets, ordained good and evil, and decided how everything would end. Maya Forstater was a British tax researcher at a think tank, and after she repeatedly voiced her belief that trans women are men, the think tank chose not to renew her contract.
Forstater challenged the decision, an employment tribunal ruled against her, and at this point Rowling was inspired to speak up. Call yourself whatever you like. The author is always right. After the outrage over her Forstater tweet, Rowling stepped away from Twitter. She returned in the spring of this year. She was taking Harry Potter quizzes. She was reorganizing her books by color, she reported, posting a video of her library.
Someone help me out. The tone called to mind her Trump-heckling days; it was a tweet that anticipated applause. It bombed. Rowling returned a half-hour later on a note of affronted righteousness. She had hesitated to discuss these things not out of shame but because they remained so difficult to revisit.
That is the simple truth. In the U. I think there are a lot of women involved in gender-critical feminism who have been really, really badly hurt by men — cis men. Very few people are going to be raped by somebody in a public toilet. Fears can be ungrounded or unfair and still be genuinely felt.
The experience of womanhood that anti-trans feminists present often seems to be defined by fear. They change your inhibitions. Twelve years before, at a Harvard commencement, Rowling had delivered a speech in which she extolled the importance of imaginative empathy. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.
Comfortably within the bounds of her own experience, she could not imagine the reader who detected a threat, if not in the person of Joanne Rowling herself, then in the audience her words might reach. It stayed up only briefly. But it lasted long enough to make an impression on Chris Elston, an insurance broker in British Columbia. The billboard was paint-bombed overnight; a city councillor called it hate speech.
Afterward, Elston sent out a call on Twitter, where he has 25, followers. He sought funding to put up more billboards, and he received an enthusiastic response. Later that month — the same week an Edinburgh street was shut down so Rowling could comply with a city order to trim her hedges — Elston was arrested at a protest in Vancouver for allegedly causing a disturbance. And Rita Skeeter is one of these lying journalists who has a poison pen and constantly lies about people and writes fake news.
Elston began the Harry Potter books for the first time with his 8-year-old daughter this year. Our Story. Missions and Values. Diversity and Inclusion. Environmental Policy. Investor Relations. Contact Us Customer Service. Trade Contacts. Writing for Bloomsbury. Working at Bloomsbury Current Opportunities.
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