Joanne Rowling was born at Yate, northeast of Bristol, South Gloucestershire, England on 31 July 1965. Her sister Dianne (Di) was born at their home when Rowling was 23 months old. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four where she attended St Michael's Primary School, later moving to Tutshill, near Chepstow, South Wales at the age of nine. She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College. Rowling was good with languages, but did not excel at sports and mathematics. There are numerous Welsh references to places, things and people in Harry Potter, which could be attributed to her time in Chepstow.
In December 1990, Rowling’s mother succumbed to a 10-year-long battle with multiple sclerosis. Rowling commented, “I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter.
After studying French and Classics at the University of Exeter (she had previously applied to Oxford but was turned down), with a year of study in Paris, she moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International. During this period, while she was on a four-hour delayed-train trip between Manchester and London, she had the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry. When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began writing immediately.
Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While there, she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes on 16 October 1992. They had one child, Jessica, who was named after Rowling’s heroine, Jessica Mitford. They divorced in 1993 after a fight in which Jorge threw her out of the house.
In December 1994, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near Rowling’s sister in Edinburgh, Scotland. Unemployed and living on state benefits, she completed her first novel. She did much of the work in the Elephant House café whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep. There was a rumour that she wrote in local cafés to escape from her unheated flat, but in a 2001 BBC interview Rowling remarked, “I am not stupid enough to rent an unheated flat in Edinburgh in midwinter. It had heating.”j K.羅琳（J.K.Rowling），英國女作家，本名喬安妮·凱瑟琳·羅琳
24歲那年，羅琳在曼徹斯特前往倫敦的火車旅途中，壹個瘦弱、戴著眼鏡的黑發小巫師，壹直在車窗外對著她微笑。他壹下子闖進了她的生命，使她萌生了創作哈利·波特的念頭。雖然當時她的手邊沒有紙和筆，但她開始天馬行空地想象，終於把這個哈利·波特的男孩故事推向了世界。於是，哈利·波特誕生了——壹個10歲小男孩，瘦小的個子，黑色亂蓬蓬的頭發，明亮的綠色眼睛，戴著圓形眼鏡，前額上有壹道細長、閃電狀的傷疤……哈利·波特成為風靡全球的童話人物。