Unit 7. Joanne Rowling

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 427.

Decide which of the following statements are true and which are false. Correct the false ones.

Listen to the dialogue “Shopping”.

1. Lena is going to the supermarket.

2. Sergey asks Lena to buy him only cigarettes.

3. Sergey says that Russian cigarettes are better than American cigarettes.

4. Olga agrees to do some shopping with Lena.

5. Olga and Lena want to buy some clothes.

6. Lena has enough money to buy everything she wants.

7. Dmitry always saves money for a rainy day.

Joanne Rowling was born in July 1965 in England. Her mother Anne was half-French and half-Scottish. Her parents met as strangers on a train in 1964. They married on 14 March 1965. Rowling's sister Dianne is 2 years younger.

Her headmaster at St Michael's Primary School, Alfred Dunn, has been suggested as the inspiration for the Harry Potter headmaster Albus Dumbledore.

As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would usually then read to her sister.

Rowling has said of her teenage years, "I wasn't particularly happy. I think it's a dreadful time of life." She had a difficult homelife; her mother was ill and she had a difficult relationship with her father (she is no longer on speaking terms with him). Rowling said of her adolescence, "Hermione [a bookish, know-it-all Harry Potter character] is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of."

In 1982, Rowling took the entrance exams for Oxford University but was not accepted and read for a BA in French and Classics at the University of Exeter. Once she made friends with "some like-minded people" she says she began to enjoy herself. Of her time at Exeter, Martin Sorrell, then a professor of French at the university, recalled "a quietly competent student, with a denim jacket and dark hair, who, in academic terms, gave the appearance of doing what was necessary." Although her own memory is of "doing no work whatsoever" and instead she "wore heavy eyeliner, listened to the Smiths, and read Dickens and Tolkien". After a year of study in Paris, Rowling graduated from Exeter in 1986 and moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.

Rowling described the conception of Harry Potter on her website:

I was travelling back to London on my own on a crowded train, and the idea for Harry Potter simply fell into my head… I didn't have a pen that worked, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one… I did not have a functioning pen with me, but I do think that this was probably a good thing. I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, while all the details bubbled up in my brain… I began to write 'Philosopher's Stone' that very evening, although those first few pages bear no resemblance to anything in the finished book.

When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began to write immediately. In December of that year, Rowling's mother died, after ten years suffering from multiple sclerosis. Rowling commented, "I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter." Rowling said this death heavily affected her writing and that she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.

In the beginning of 90-s Rowling moved to Porto in Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. She taught at night, and began writing in the day whilst listening to Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. While there she met Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes in a bar, after sharing a mutual interest in Jane Austen. They married on 16 October 1992 and their child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes, was born on 27 July 1993 in Portugal. Rowling had previously suffered a miscarriage. They separated on 17 November 1993. In December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near Rowling's sister in Edinburgh, Scotland, with three chapters of Harry Potter in her suitcase.

Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling saw herself as "the biggest failure I knew." Her marriage had failed, she was jobless with a dependent child, but she described her failure as liberating:

During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, and contemplated suicide. It was the feeling of her illness which brought her the idea of Dementors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book. Rowling signed up for welfare benefits, describing her economic status as being "poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless."

…I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

– J. K. Rowling, "The fringe benefits of failure", 2008.

In order to teach in Scotland she would need a postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE), requiring a full-time, year-long course of study. She began this course in August 1995, after completing her first novel while having survived on social security. She wrote in many cafés, especially Nicolson's Café, and The Elephant House, (the former owned by her brother-in-law Roger Moore) wherever she could get Jessica to fall asleep, taking her baby out for a walk was the best way to make her fall asleep.

In 1995, Rowling finished her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on an old manual typewriter. The book was submitted to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected the manuscript. A year later she was finally given the green light (and a £1500 advance) by editor Barry Cunningham from Bloomsbury, a publishing house in London. The decision to publish Rowling's book apparently owes much to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury's chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father and immediately demanded the next. Soon after, in 1997, Rowling received an £8000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council to enable her to continue writing.

The book was first published by Bloomsbury Children's Books in June 1997, under the name J.K. Rowling. The “K”, for Kathleen, her paternal grandmother's name was added at her publisher's request who thought that a woman's name would not appeal to the target audience of young boys.

In 2004, Forbes named Rowling as the first person to become a U.S.-dollar billionaire by writing books. Rowling disputed the calculations and said she had plenty of money, but was not a billionaire. In 2012, Forbes removed Rowling from their rich list, claiming that her over $160 million in charitable donations and the high tax rate in the UK meant she was no longer a billionaire.

On 26 December 2001, Rowling married Neil Michael Murray (born 30 June 1971), an anaesthetist. This was a second marriage for both Rowling and Murray. In December 2003 Rowling became estranged from her father Peter Rowling, with whom she already claimed to have a difficult relationship.

It stemmed from her father's decision in 2003 to sell personalised copies of the Harry Potter series at Sotheby's auction house, including a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire inscribed with a Father's Day message "lots of love from your first-born" that sold for GBP 50,000.

Rowling's and Murray's son, David, was born on 24 March 2003. Shortly after Rowling began writing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince she took a break from working on the novel to care for him in his early infancy. Rowling's youngest child, daughter Mackenzie was born on 23 January 2005.

In 2000, Rowling established the Volant Charitable Trust, which uses its annual budget of £5.1 million to combat poverty and social inequality. The fund also gives to organisations that aid children, one parent families, and multiple sclerosis research. Rowling said, "I think you have a moral responsibility when you've been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it and give intelligently."

J.K. Rowling is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees. She supports a wide number of charitable causes through her charitable trust Volant, and is the founder of Lumos, a charity working to transform the lives of disadvantaged children.

J.K. Rowling lives in Edinburgh with her husband and three children.

J.K. Rowling's latest book, The Casual Vacancy, her first novel for adults, was published in English in September 2012.