J.K. Rowling

My mother and father met on a train traveling from King's Cross station

to Arbroath in Scotland when they were both eighteen.

Both left the Navy and moved to a bungalow in the West of England. My

mother gave birth to me when she was twenty.

My sister Di arrived a year and eleven months after me. Di has very dark

hair, and dark brown eyes. We left the bungalow when I was four and

moved to Winterbourne. The small amount of time that we didn't spend

fighting, Di and I were best friends. I enjoyed school in Winterbourne.

However, my parents had always harbored a dream of living in the

country, and around my ninth birthday we moved for the last time, to

Tutshill in Wales. The worst thing that happened during my teenage

years was my mother becoming ill. She was diagnosed with multiple

sclerosis when I was fifteen. I left school in 1983 and went to study at the

University of Exeter, on the south coast of England. I studied French. It

was after a weekend, when I was traveling back to London on my own

on a train, that the idea for Harry Potter fell into my head.

I didn't have a pen with me, and I was too shy to ask. I sat and thought,

for four hours, and all the details bubbled in my brain. I began to write

the 'Sorcerer's Stone' that very evening. I moved up to Manchester,

taking the manuscript with me including ideas for the rest of Harry's

career. Then, on December 30th 1990, my mother died.

Nine months later, desperate to get away, I left for Portugal, where I

got a job teaching English. I hoped that when I returned I would have

a finished book under my arm. In fact, I had something even better: my

daughter. I married a Portuguese man, and although we divorced, it had

given me the best thing in my life. Jessica and I arrived in Edinburgh,