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Summary
Summary
When a letter arrives for unhappy but ordinary Harry Potter, a decade-old secret is revealed to him that apparently he's the last to know. His parents were wizards, killed by a Dark Lord's curse when Harry was just a baby, and which he somehow survived. Leaving his unsympathetic aunt and uncle for Hogwarts, a wizarding school brimming with ghosts and enchantments, Harry stumbles upon a sinister adventure when he finds a three-headed dog guarding a room on the third floor. Then he hears of a missing stone with astonishing powers which could be valuable, dangerous, or both.
Author Notes
J. K. (Joanne Kathleen) Rowling was born in Gloucestershire, U. K. on July 31, 1965. She also writes fiction novels under the name of Robert Galbraith. Rowling attended Tutshill Primary and then went on to Wyedean Comprehensive where she was made Head Girl in her final year. She received a degree in French from Exeter University. She later took some teaching classes at Moray House Teacher Training College and a teacher-training course in Manchester, England. This extensive education created a perfect foundation to spark the Harry Potter series that Rowling is renowned for.
After college, Rowling moved to London to work for Amnesty International, where she researched human rights abuses in Francophone Africa, and worked as a bilingual secretary. In 1992, Rowling quit office work to move to Portugal and teach English as a Second Language. There she met and married her husband, a Portuguese TV journalist. But the marriage dissolved soon after the birth of their daughter. It was after her stint teaching in Portugal that Rowling began to write the premise for Harry Potter. She returned to Britain and settled in Edinburgh to be near her sister, and attempted to at least finish her book, before looking for another teaching job. Rowling was working as a French teacher when her book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in June of 1997 and was an overnight sensation.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone won the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award, and received a Commended citation in the Carnegie Medal awards. She also received 8,000 pounds from the Scottish Arts Council, which contributed to the finishing touches on The Chamber of Secrets. Rowling continued on to win the Smarties Book Prize three years in a row, the only author ever to do so. At the Bologna Book Fair, Arthur Levine from Scholastic Books, bought the American rights to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone for the unprecedented amount of $105,000.00. The book was retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for it's American release, and proceeded to top the Best Seller's lists for children's and adult books. The American edition won Best of the Year in the School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Parenting Magazine and the Cooperative Children's Book Center. It was also noted as an ALA Notable Children's Book as well as Number One on the Top Ten of ALA's Best Books for Young Adults. The Harry Potter Series consists of seven books, one for each year of the main character's attendance at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. All of the books in the series have been made into successful movies. She is number 1 on the Hollywood Reporter's '25 Most Powerful Authors' 2016 list. She has also written Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Quidditch Through the Ages, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard. She won the 2016 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award. In 2016 she, along with Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, published the script of the play Harry Potter and the cursed child. It became an instant bestseller.
Rowling's first novel for an adult audience,The Casual Vacancy, was published by Little Brown in September 2012. She made The New York Times Best Seller List with her title Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination. She published two bestselling fiction novels under the name of Robert Galbraith: The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Guardian Review
JK Rowlings wizard tale has been translated into 79 foreign languages, but this new version may just be the best of all Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone is not a very good book. Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stane is terrific. The Scots version of JK Rowlings debut, to be published this Thursday by Itchy Coo, is the 80th language into which the novel has been translated. But what is the point? After all, anyone who can read the book in Scots will already be able to read it in English. This is not just a translation, though. Matthew Fitt, the translator, has applied a defibrillator to Rowlings flatlined text and made it come alive. Take the introduction of Harrys uncle, Mr Dursley. No longer is he the director of a firm that makes drills; he is, in fact, the heidbummer a word which is not only funnier, but better conveys his professional smugness. When the Dursleys try to keep their nephew from his magical destiny by fleeing on a stormy sea, the journey is described thus: Icy spindrift and rain creepit doon their craigies and a cranreuch wund whuppit their faces. Some will recognise that word cranreuch cold from the Burns poem To a Mouse. Other Scots parents may simply be glad of the chance to read Harry Potter as a bedtime story without being bored into slumber themselves. Fitt has taken liberties with names. The sport of Quidditch is now Bizzumbaw, a bizzum being a broom (as well as a fine Scots insult) and baw being ball. The Sorting Hat becomes the Bletherin Bunnet. Albus Dumbledore is renamed Dumbiedykes an in-joke for those who know that is an area of Edinburgh, the city where Rowling wrote the book. Dumbiedykes is one of the few characters brave enough to call Voldemort by name; most think it safer to refer to him as You-Ken-Wha. According to the 2011 census, there are more than 1.5 million Scots speakers. However, the question of whether it is a language or a dialect of English is sometimes hotly disputed, in part as a proxy for the independence question. For Fitt, who was belted at school for using Scots (not uncommon among those of his generation or older), the novel is a statement about the status of Scots that he hopes will boost the self-esteem of children: If the way they speak is in a Harry Potter book, it must be OK. The translation uses standard Scots words and sounds used throughout Scotland, without regional variation. The exception is Hagrid, who is Dundonian. The classic illustration of the flattened vowels of Dundee is that natives say peh for pie, the totemic foodstuff of the city. Unfortunately nae pehs appear in the book, says Fitt. But had there been, Hagrid would have been straight into them. - Peter Ross.