J K Rowling

J.K. Rowling has a request for those with inside dirt on her seventh and final Harry Potter book: Please keep it to yourself. "We're a little under three months away, now, and the first distant rumblings of the weirdness that usually precedes a Harry Potter publication can be heard on the horizon," Rowling wrote on her website Monday.

Author J.K. Rowling said Thursday that she was "staggered" that U.S. newspapers published reviews of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" before the book officially goes on sale at midnight Friday. The "purported spoilers" are "in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children, who wanted to reach Harry's final destination by themselves," Rowling said in a statement released by her United Kingdom publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing.

J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, lost a privacy lawsuit Tuesday over the rights of a photo agency to use a picture of her son. London High Court Justice Nicholas Patten dismissed a suit filed in the name of the author's 3-year-old son, saying the legal action had "no reasonable or realistic chance of success." Rowling, 42, and her husband, Neil Murray, had sued photo agency Big Pictures U.K. Ltd.

J.K. Rowling has been spotted at cafes in Scotland working on a detective novel, a British newspaper reported Saturday. The Sunday Times newspaper quoted Ian Rankin, a fellow author and neighbor of Rowling's, as saying the creator of the "Harry Potter" books is turning to crime fiction. "My wife spotted her writing her Edinburgh criminal detective novel," the newspaper, which was available late Saturday, quoted Rankin as telling a reporter at an Edinburgh literary festival.

A book of fairy tales created, handwritten and illustrated by J.K. Rowling sold for nearly $4 million at auction Thursday. The buyer, London art agent Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox, now has one of only seven copies of "The Tales of Beedle the Bard," which is leather bound with silver mounts. The book originally had been expected to sell for about $100,000. The standing-room-only crowd at Sotheby's auction house applauded as bidding topped the $2-million mark.

J.K. Rowling, the creator of boy wizard Harry Potter, was voted Britain's greatest living writer in a survey released Thursday. Readers of the Book Magazine ranked Rowling ahead of literary heavyweights including Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Harold Pinter and A.S. Byatt. Rowling, who is writing the seventh and final Potter book, received almost three times as many votes as fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, who is No. 2 on the list.

J.K. Rowling expects to have a busy 2006, "the year when I write the final book in the Harry Potter series." Rowling expects to start on the final book, not yet titled, next month. "I contemplate the task with mingled feelings of excitement and dread, because I can't wait to get started, to tell the final part of the story and, at last, to answer all the questions (Will I ever answer all of the questions?

"Harry Potter" novelist J.K. Rowling says her young hero will survive to the seventh book in her series about the young wizard, but she won't say whether he would reach adulthood. Rowling, now at work on the sixth book, teased a group of fans with morsels of information as she gave a reading of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Sunday.

Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling was the top female earner in Britain this year, according to a new survey of the country's richest people. Her annual pay of $77 million was six times greater than the salary of Queen Elizabeth II, the Mail reported on Sunday. The writer was followed by Madonna, who makes $43 million a year.

France paid homage to the British author behind fiction's most famous boy wizard by inducting Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling into the country's prestigious Legion of Honor on Tuesday. French President Nicolas Sarkozy bestowed Rowling with the honorary title of "knight" in the legion during a ceremony in a gilded hall in the Elysee presidential palace. Rowling said that one of her great-grandfathers, who was French, had received the Legion of Honor in 1924 for his courage in the Battle of Verdun during the First World War. In 2003, even before it was translated into French, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" -- the fifth book in the series -- became the first book in English ever to top the French bestsellers' list.