Record-breaking author JK Rowling recently reflected on the moment she first realized that her creation, Harry Potter, had become a worldwide phenomenon.
Rowling’s seven-book series, which tells the adventures of Harry and his friends at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, has sold over 500 million copies worldwide and spawned a film series valued at over $10 billion. But in 1997, when her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (in the USA under the title “Sorcerer’s Stone”), the future was anything but certain.
In conversation with The Sunday Times Rowling recalled in an interview with the newspaper that everything had flown by until she won the Smarties Book Prize in 1997. “Then I got a record advance from America and everything went crazy.”
The road to this point was long. It took Rowling seven years to complete and publish the first book. She admitted that she often lost hope and put the manuscript down several times. “I kept losing hope and putting it down, but that happened less and less as I worked on it. At a certain point it or I caught fire and I stopped doubting,” she said. One of the most memorable moments for her was writing the first Quidditch match, which flowed from her pen and required hardly any revisions.
Rowling has always had a passion for writing, a dream rooted in her childhood. She vividly remembers the first books that fired her imagination, including Richard Scarry’s A very busy world and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty.
