Harry Potter Society - Half Blood Prince

JK Rowling was born on July 31st, 1965, in Chipping Sodbury (England). She lived in Yates, where she and her younger sister, Di, used to play in the streets with two siblings who had Potter as a surname.
Jo (as she likes to be called) wrote her first book at the age of six. The story was about a rabbit called Rabbit, and ever since that she has wanted to be a writer.

When she was nine her family moved again, this time to Tutshill, a very small place (practically a street with a church and school at the end of it). There she attended a primary school, which she liked, although she didn’t feel the same about her first teacher, Mrs. Morgan, who marked her as a “stupid girl”. Her high school years were spent at Wyedean Comprehensive, where her favourite subject was English and she did not excel in sports. Her favourite activity was telling stories to her studious and serious friends over lunchtime--serial stories, in which they all performed heroic feats and good deeds.

During this time, on a particularly long train ride from Manchester to London in the summer of 1990, the idea came to her of a boy who is a wizard and doesn't know it. He attends a school for wizardry--she could see him very plainly in her mind. By the time the train pulled into King's Cross Station four hours later, many of the characters and the early stages of the plot were fully formed in her head. The story took further shape as she continued working on it in pubs and cafes over her lunch hours. Rowling had been writing short stories and working on two unpublished novels for adults, but now the idea of Harry Potter took over her writing time.
Joanne met and married a journalist in Portugal (he was Portuguese), and her daughter, Jessica, was born in 1993. Shortly after the birth of her daughter, the marriage ended in divorce, and Ms. Rowling, along with her infant daughter, moved to Edinburgh, Scotland so that she could be near her younger sister, Di. It was during this time period that JK became determined to not only finish her Harry Potter ‘wizard’ novel, but to get it published.

She wrote the first book on five years and got herself a literary agent, Cristopher Little. Jo used the writer name “J. K. Rowling”, because she did not want people to know she was female and she thought it looked good with a “K” for Kathleen (a name she likes).

Rowling was working as a French teacher when she heard that her book about the boy wizard had been accepted for publication. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in June 1997 and achieved almost instant success. It won the Smarties Book Prize Gold Medal for ages 9-11 and was named the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year. It was also short listed for the Guardian Fiction Award and Carnegie Medal (for which it received a "Commended" citation). At the Bologna Book Fair, Arthur Levine, an editorial director for Scholastic Books, bought the American rights for $105,000.00, an unprecedented figure for a first-time children's author. The advance for the American edition made it possible for Rowling to quit her teaching job and write full-time. She had always conceived of the stories as a seven-book saga and now had the luxury to concentrate on writing the sequels to the first installment.