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The Harry Potter Wizarding Almanac book cover
The Harry Potter Wizarding Almanac
2023
First Published
4.28
Average Rating
208
Number of Pages
The only official companion to the seven spellbinding novels about the Boy Who Lived, fully illustrated and superbly sorted – the perfect gift for Harry Potter fans of all ages! Whisk yourself away to Harry Potter’s wizarding world with this Whiz-bang of an illustrated companion. Discover magical places, study wandlore, encounter fantastic beasts, and find out about the witches and wizards who lived. From the Sorting Hat to the secrets of the Forbidden Forest, it’s all packed inside! This dazzling gift book brings together beloved characters, unforgettable moments, and iconic locations from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone all the way through to The Deathly Hallows . It’s the ultimate magical miscellany, filled with facts and fun about the wizarding world, beautifully catalogued and brilliantly explored. Joyfully illustrated throughout in full color by seven stunning artists and tingling with astonishing details to spot on every page, this is the ideal introduction to the Harry Potter stories for new readers and sure to surprise and fascinate lifelong fans. From incredible cross-sections to magical maps and ingenious lists, lose yourself exploring Hogwarts and beyond…
Avg Rating
4.28
Number of Ratings
8,893
5 STARS
60%
4 STARS
21%
3 STARS
11%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
5%
goodreads

Author

J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling
Author · 96 books

See also: Robert Galbraith Although she writes under the pen name J.K. Rowling, pronounced like rolling, her name when her first Harry Potter book was published was simply Joanne Rowling. Anticipating that the target audience of young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman, her publishers demanded that she use two initials, rather than her full name. As she had no middle name, she chose K as the second initial of her pen name, from her paternal grandmother Kathleen Ada Bulgen Rowling. She calls herself Jo and has said, "No one ever called me 'Joanne' when I was young, unless they were angry." Following her marriage, she has sometimes used the name Joanne Murray when conducting personal business. During the Leveson Inquiry she gave evidence under the name of Joanne Kathleen Rowling. In a 2012 interview, Rowling noted that she no longer cared that people pronounced her name incorrectly. Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling, a Rolls-Royce aircraft engineer, and Anne Rowling (née Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16 km) northeast of Bristol. Her mother Anne was half-French and half-Scottish. Her parents first met on a train departing from King's Cross Station bound for Arbroath in 1964. They married on 14 March 1965. Her mother's maternal grandfather, Dugald Campbell, was born in Lamlash on the Isle of Arran. Her mother's paternal grandfather, Louis Volant, was awarded the Croix de Guerre for exceptional bravery in defending the village of Courcelles-le-Comte during the First World War. Rowling's sister Dianne was born at their home when Rowling was 23 months old. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She attended St Michael's Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce and education reformer Hannah More. Her headmaster at St Michael's, 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. She recalls that: "I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called Rabbit. He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee." At the age of nine, Rowling moved to Church Cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Tutshill, close to Chepstow, Wales. When she was a young teenager, her great aunt, who Rowling said "taught classics and approved of a thirst for knowledge, even of a questionable kind," gave her a very old copy of Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels. Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books. Rowling has said of her teenage years, in an interview with The New Yorker, "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). She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother had worked as a technician in the science department. 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." Steve Eddy, who taught Rowling English when she first arrived, remembers her as "not exceptional" but "one of a group of girls who were bright, and quite good at English." Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books.

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