After Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling found herself at the center of a surreal war of words with Russian President Vladimir Putin over ‘cancel culture’. 

It’s certainly not the first time Rowling has courted controversy. She’s been trolled on Twitter, sued (unsuccessfully) for allegedly plagiarizing the idea for her wildly successful books, and criticized - even by Harry Potter’s own movie stars - since publishing her first, magical book in 1997.

Through it all, J.K. Rowling has come out fighting. Her strength and tenacity have made the Potter series the top-selling books of all time. With more than 500m copies sold, J.K. Rowling has gone from a single mom on benefits to one of the world’s best-known authors. Along the way, she's embedded Harry Potter into popular culture where wizards now sit comfortably alongside superheroes.

So who is this force of nature? 

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Loss of innocence

The world seemed to be Joanne Rowling’s for the taking while she was growing up in small-town England. Born in 1965, Joanne was intelligent, well educated, and the daughter of middle-class parents. She dreamed about being a writer, studied French at university and lived in Paris for a year.
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Appearances were deceiving, however. Joanne developed an obsessive-compulsive disorder which led to her constantly "checking, double-checking, triple-checking" things. Her mother, Anne Rowling, was diagnosed with a virulent strain of multiple sclerosis when Joanne was 15 and the relationship with her father was strained. Rowling later described their home as “a difficult place to be”.

By the time she’d turned 25, Joanne was already conjuring up characters for her first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997), while delayed on a train. Her life would soon take a devastating turn, however, with the death of her mother in 1990.

Within a short period of time, Joanne was made redundant from her office job in Manchester where she’d moved to be near her boyfriend. Their relationship fell apart and Rowling described her state as ‘fight or flight’. She fled to Portugal to teach English at night school and spend her days writing. Unsurprisingly, Harry Potter’s themes involve death and the battle between good and evil. The issues were playing out in real-time as Joanne wrote her manuscript.

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Fight or flight revisited‍

She met journalist Jorge Arantes in Portugal and they married in 1992 only for the relationship to fall apart the following year. Joanne described the marriage as ‘violent’.  At that point, the couple shared a daughter, Jessica. She would need to raise the baby alone. Joanne flew back to Edinburgh, Scotland, with plans to stay with her sister and sort out new accommodation. All she could afford was a down-at-heel apartment Joanne described as ‘mouse-ridden’.

Seven years after graduating from university, Joanne was living on her £69 (about $100 a month) welfare benefits and caring for a baby. She described the dire situation as being as ‘poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless’.

Writing and her daughter were Joanne’s only salvation. She’d escape to cafés to work on her manuscript. Jane Austen - her favorite author of all time - was a literary influence, along with Shakespeare and author Kenneth Grahame who wrote the children's fantasy The Wind in the Willows.

Rowling later said writing saved her life as she battled depression, and that her concerns about love, loss, separation, and death are all reflected in the first book.

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Rowling's big break‍

Twelve publishers rejected the manuscript before Bloomsbury Publishing eventually bought it. Joanne’s fate - and the rest of her life - turned on the opinion of an eight-year-old. Nigel Newton, head of Bloomsbury, gave the first chapter of Joanne’s manuscript to his daughter to read. The child wanted more. The rest is the stuff of magic. 

Joanne received $105,000 for the US rights and bought an apartment in Edinburgh. The next books were released in quick succession, each selling in the millions. When Warner Bros. purchased film rights to the first two Harry Potter novels, Joanne was reported in line for a $1m payday, which grew with the sale of film rights about her character Newt Scamander, author of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Rowling, finally finding her footing again, married Neil Murray, a doctor, in 2001 and moved to an estate in Perthshire, Scotland to lead a private life but the quiet wouldn’t last long. 
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Political activism‍

Joanne Rowling regained her confidence and her political voice. She commended Labor's policies on child poverty and published a Single mother's manifesto in The Times criticizing PM David Cameron's plan to encourage married couples to stay together by offering them a tax credit. Joanne also opposed the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and UK Brexit referendum to leave Europe.

By 2004, Forbes had named Rowling ‘the first billion-dollar author’ (she denied it) but the business magazine concluded that by 2012 she was no longer a billionaire due to her charitable donations and high UK taxes. J.K. Rowling appeared to be back on top in 2021, however, when The Sunday Times estimated Rowling's fortune at $1.08bn, ranking her in the top 200 of Britain’s richest.

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A superhero to charities 

While still writing the Harry Potter series, Rowling established the Volant Charitable Trust to support women, children, and young people at risk.

She also worked - first as an ambassador and later as president - at the charity Gingerbread in 2004 while collaborating on writing a book of children's stories to benefit One Parent Families. 

Along with MEP Emma Nicholson, Rowling founded what later became Lumos, inspired by reports about children in caged beds in institutions in the Czech Republic. After the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Rowling said she would personally match up to £1m ($1.3m) in donations made toward an emergency appeal launched by Lumos.

Rowling's donations are substantial. Forbes estimated them at $160m in 2012. She was named as the second most generous UK donor in 2015 (following singer Elton John), giving about $14m.

Joanne’s also donated to medical causes. In 2010, Rowling offered £10m to found a multiple sclerosis research center at the University of Edinburgh in honor of her mother and an additional £15.3m to the center in 2019. To support COVID-19 relief, she donated $1.25m to help victims of abuse.

Along the way, she has given a percentage of her book profits to charities from time to time. Some of the proceeds from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages, both published in 2001, went to the charity Comic Relief which aims to alleviate poverty. 
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Enduring controversy

‍Despite her substantial charitable work, Joanne Rowling has been better known since 2019 for expressing her opinions on transgender people and related civil rights. Her comments have been criticized as transphobic by some LGBT rights organizations and feminists, but have received support from other individuals.

Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter films) takes a wide view.

“I am hugely grateful [for] everything that she's done. I think that she's extremely talented, and I mean, clearly, her works are genius," Grint told Esquire. "But yeah, I think, also, you can have huge respect for someone and still disagree with things like that.”