Although she writes under the pen name "J. K. Rowling", her name is really Joanne Rowling. Her publisher, Bloomsbury, feared that the targeted audience of young boys might not want to buy books written by a girl, and so he said for her to use two initials, instead of her real initials.

Joanne was born on July 31, 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England. She attended St. Michael's Primary School, where the inspiration for Albus Dumbledore was her headmaster, “Alfred Dunn”. She also attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College. Rowling says "Hermione is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of." Rowling read for a BA in French and Classics at the University of Exeter, and after a year of study in Paris, she moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.

In 1990, while she was on a train going from Manchester to London, the idea for the Harry Potter story "came fully formed" into her mind. She told the Boston Globe that she doesn't really know where the idea came from but it all started with a boy named Harry. Once Harry came to mind, all these characters and situations came to mind.

Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While in Porto, she married a Portuguese television journalist named, Jorge Arantes, on October 16th, 1992. They had one child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes, born on July 27th, 1993. Just months