JK Rowling: Learning to live with fame, fortune and life without Harry

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, on finishing the last page of his historical novel, The White Company in 1890, cried "That's torn it!" and flung his steel-tipped pen across the study so it twanged in the wood panelling. Edward Gibbon, on finishing Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1787, after 15 years' work, went for a reflective stroll in his arboretum and recorded "a profound combination of exhilaration and melancholy". When J K Rowling completed the last page of her seven-volume, multi-movie-spawning, billion-spinning, Harry Potter super-saga earlier this year, she too felt the moment deserved a memorial. She was staying at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh and recorded the moment by inscribing, on a marble bust, the words: "J K Rowling finished writing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in this room (652) on 11 January 2007." The bust was of Hermes, the Greek messenger of the gods, the patron of arts, eloquence and alchemy, and the author of all mystical doctrines. It seems almost too neat that the marble god should have been sharing a room with the mistress of commercial mysticism, who has single-handedly alchemised children's literature into billion-selling gold. Was it a coincidence? Or luck? Or was it (shudder) magic?

A heady witches' brew of talent, luck and magic have conspired to make her the richest and most famous author on the planet. Her books have sold over 325 million copies worldwide. Her wealth is conservatively estimated at between £600m and £700m; in 2004 she was declared a dollar- billionaire. She's richer than the Queen (who made her an OBE in 2000) and the second highest-earning female "entertainer" in the world after Oprah Winfrey. There's an asteroid named after her. The first four Potter titles have been filmed by Warner brothers, with great success. She was named by The Book Magazine (not an infallible guide) as "Britain's greatest writer," ahead of Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Harold Pinter. Yet she remains an enigma - an intensely private person with a craving for security, a horror of intrusion, a distrust of fame ("I never wanted it and I never expected it and certainly never worked for it, and I see it as something I have to get through really") but also a person of considerable ego, who graciously embraces its worldly trappings, and invites Charles and Camilla round to dinner.

There's a fairy-tale quality about the life of the girl from Gloucestershire who came to rule the world. She was born in July 1965, to a middle-class couple, Anne and Peter. He was a Rolls-Royce engineer. Jo Rowling ("When I was young, nobody ever called me Joanne unless they were angry") grew up in the village of Winterbourne and Tutshill, near Chepstow, south Wales, which may account for the many Welsh allusions in the Potter canon. She used to make up stories with her younger sister Di, and they would enact them together at home. She read French and classics at Exeter University, then worked as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.

The story of Harry's composition has passed into history - how the tale came to her during a train journey between Manchester and Clapham Junction: "It was after a weekend's flathunting, when I was travelling back to London on my own on a crowded train, that the idea for Harry Potter simply fell into my head. I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six. But I had never been so excited about an ideas before... I sat and thought for four (delayed train) hours, and all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me." How the plots of all seven books were mapped out in her head before she began writing the first. And how she wrote the final chapter years ago, and told readers that the very last word of the book is "scar". For a shy ingénue unused to the ways of the media, she's always been notably clever at tantalising readers and giving the press little bulletins and teases about her intentions with the plot - until the movements of her imagination themselves become news.

When Rowling was 25, she received the worst blow of her life when her mother, a long-term sufferer from multiple sclerosis, died at only 45. Jo was spending her first Christmas away from home. It was New Year's Day, 1991, and her father was on the phone at 7am. "I just knew what had happened (omega) before he spoke," she told Tatler magazine, "I just knew. There was no way my father would call me at 7am for any reason other than that." She is convinced, a little spookily, that she was writing Harry's adventures at the moment her mother died, although she'd never told her about her fictional hero.

The juxtaposition is important. Death, and the fear of death, hang over the Potter chronicles in a way that's unusual in books aimed at children. When the series opens, we learn that Harry's parents are dead, killed by a vile untermensch called Lord Voldemort, whose name translates as Death-wing or Death-flight. He himself is on a ceaseless quest to cheat death and become immortal. Young and old readers wept at the untimely death (in HP and the Order of the Phoenix) of Harry's friend Sirius Black. And Rowling has promised that, in the seventh and final book of the series, the doomily titled HP and the Deathly Hallows, there will be two deaths, leading millions of readers to speculate that both Voldemort and Harry will become toast.

Critics looking for the psychological underpinning of the plot have pointed to Harry's distress at losing his mother, and his desire to be reunited with her, which seem to echo Rowling's own feelings. It's also significant that, when she was 15, at the start of her mother's illness, she discovered a heroine. It was Jessica Mitford, the writer and civil rights activist, the most left-wing and enterprising of the Mitford sisters. Jo loved her cheek, her wanderlust, her spunky spirit. "When my great-aunt gave me Hons and Rebels when I was 14, she instantly became my heroine. She ran away from home to fight in the Spanish Civil War, taking with her a camera that she had charged to her father's account. I wished I'd had the nerve to do something like that. I love the way she never outgrew some of her adolescent traits, remaining true to her politics - she was a self-taught socialist - throughout her life. I think I've read everything she wrote. I even called my daughter after her." Perhaps it was the combination of sorrow and sympathy for her mother, and the fire of Mitford's impetuous bravery that kindled a teenage hero against the Dark Forces in Rowling's teenage heart.

After her mother died, she moved to Portugal to teach English-as-a-foreign-language and finish her book. There she met and married a Portuguese TV journalist called Jorge Arantes. A year later, in 1993, the couple divorced, leaving Jo with a daughter, Jessica. They moved to Edinburgh in 1994, where her sister Dianne lived, and Jo finished the first Harry book, writing mostly in local cafés (the Elephant House Café, Nicolson's Café) while Jessica slept beside her. She and Jessica were then living on £70 state benefit a week. Asked about her response to great riches, she has said: "If you've literally been worrying, 'Will the money last until the end of the week?' you will never, ever complain about having money. It enables you, sets you free from worry. It allows you to travel, to help people. There is no way I'm ever going to complain about having the money. I'm grateful for it every single day."

The initial response was, as they say, mixed. She found an agent, Christopher Little, who sent her manuscript to a reader, Bryony Evans. The Evans report was the most glowingly excited response the agency had ever seen. But publishers weren't biting. A dozen turned down Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, perhaps feeling that the market in school-wizard stories was already well-tilled by Humphrey Carpenter's Mr Majeika books. Then Nigel Newton, chairman of Bloomsbury, took the book home, and gave the first chapter to his eight-year-old daughter, Alice. She read it and asked to see the next. That was enough. They offered her an advance of £1,500, and printed a first edition of just a thousand. Several American publishers, less cautious, fought for the US rights, and watched the auction price climb to £100,000. It was won by Scholastic, who have remained her American publishers ever since. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone first appeared on 30 June 1997 from Bloomsbury, the London publishers who have presided over the whole series and seen their fortunes rocket in the process. Philosopher's Stone, by far the most popular of the Potter books, has sold 107 million copies to date and is No 9 in the list of the bestselling books of all time.

For 10 years - closely, even spookily, shadowing the prime ministerial career of Tony Blair - she has been feted, lionised, showered with praise. She won the Smarties Prize so often that she withdrew her books from contention, to give other writers a chance. All her books have broken sales records. Partly due to a shrewdly orchestrated marketing strategy by Bloomsbury, her last three titles (Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince) each broke the record for the fastest-selling book in history, to be eclipsed in turn by the next.

Levels of Rowling-worship have been growing apace for some years. Just as a cult religion spawns a universe of downstream followers who themselves become part of the mythology, Rowling has spawned an industry of critical and explanatory media. No fewer than 190 books of fandom and critical appraisal have been published in the last 10 years. An annual Harry Potter conference, called Lumos, brings 1,200 enthusiasts to Las Vegas every summer, dressed in wizard hats, cloaks and wands, earnestly attending Marxist readings of Harry's adventures, and lectures on such topics as "Parallels in Tyranny: Voldemort, The Ministry of Magic and Jewish Persecution." An elaborate website, The Harry Potter Lexicon, searches the Potter canon for all references to Draco Malfoy's home or to Blast-Ended Skrewts. Another site, MuggleNet, features on its home page a clock counting down the seconds, hours and days before the publication of Deathly Hallows; MuggleNet brought out a book of Potter arcana with a print run of 335,000; it hit the No 2 spot in the New York Times children's bestseller list.

Rowling herself seems in two minds about the unprecedented levels of adulation she has inspired. Who was it that said, at the 2006 British Book Awards, "These days, the publication of a Harry Potter is a process of frank insanity"? It was she. But who is it that keeps a constantly updated on-line list of hare-brained rumours from the wilder shores of Potter fans? Why, the same Ms Rowling. She seems to look with amusement at the pandemonium she has caused, but is happy to take credit for bringing the children of the iPod and digital age back to the delights of reading stories. And she seems rather tickled, or moved, by the imaginative leaps taken by her fans in guessing where her story lines will go next.

She's always, however, contrived to seem remarkably detached and unexcited by the storm she has created. I met her in 1997, at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, just after (omega) the publication of her first book. My daughter Sophie, then 10, had read it and was recommending it to all her friends. I saw Ms Rowling in a restaurant dining with an agent friend, and I popped over to say hello (I was festival director; it was allowed.) I'll always remember the fish-eyed non-interest with which she regarded me. "My daughter's a big fan of your book," I blurted. "I'm sure she's dying to ask you about it." Sophie, perhaps aware of an unusual froideur in the air, remained silent. "Not actually dying, it seems..." murmured Ms Rowling, and we were dismissed. Since then, many people have remarked on her coolness under public scrutiny (she even calls herself "somewhat po-faced"), her disengaged quality.

As the royalty cheques grew ever larger, and the wealth mounted up, and she acquired three houses - in London, Edinburgh and Perthshire - plus two secretaries to handle her 1,000 letters a week, she became the most eligible single parent in Christendom. Fortune threw in her path a bearded, down-to-earth Scottish anaesthetist called Neil Murray, whom she married on Boxing Day 2001. They have two children David, four, and Mackenzie, two. The Rowling/Murray family home in Edinburgh is, effectively, two houses knocked into one 13-bedroom pile worth £2m. It's protected by high fences, electric gates and CCTV. As well as the secretaries and a diary-keeping PA, she allegedly employs a £150,000-a-year, ex-SAS bodyguard to protect her and the family. She works a prosaic writer's day, sitting before a computer in her office each morning, making herself a lunchtime sandwich, writing again until it's time for Jessica to come home from school. "The point about Jo," a friend told the press, "is that she doesn't want to be flashy or ostentatious, ever. She wants to be left alone to have a normal family life."

As the press grew more and more interested in her, once she began stepping out with Murray, she felt besieged. Begging letters began arriving. Death threats came in the post. On a family holiday in Mauritius, paparazzi snappers took shots of her in a bikini. A freelance snooper went through her rubbish. Tabloid stalkers discovered her buying (they hoped) saucy underwear in Agent Provocateur. Pictures of Jessica, when she was scarcely in double figures, appeared in the press. Rowling was immensely distressed.

"I imagined being a famous writer would be like being Jane Austen, being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous," she said. "I didn't think they'd rake through my bins. I didn't expect to be photographed on the beach through long lenses. I never dreamed it would impact my daughter's life negatively, which it has."

Then at some point in the last two years, she seemed to relax into her fame and wealth. Perhaps it was conquering a nasty attack of writer's block in the middle of HP and the Goblet of Fire, or perhaps the huge, simple pleasure of seeing the end of her vast project in sight at last, but she came out of her retreat, her chilly purdah. She appeared at book-award ceremonies wearing startling, plunge-line gowns, every inch the glamour-puss. A gorgeous photo-shoot for Tatler brought out all her sleek, melancholy beauty. And she took an evident delight in giving away lots of her money. She has given £22m to Comic Relief in the past, but in 2006 embarked on two charitable causes close to her heart. One is research into multiple sclerosis, which confined her mother to a wheelchair and finally killed her. Rowling handed over millions towards funding a Centre for Regenerative Medicine at Edinburgh University - nobody knows why, but Scotland is now the MS capital of the world. The other is the Children's High Level Group, which tries to free children from their appalling imprisonment in "care homes" in eastern Europe. The author made a special journey to Bucharest last year to investigate the problem and raise funds. No ordinary philanthropist, she throws herself, heart and soul, into selected causes. Two months ago, she contributed half a million dollars to the reward fund for the six-year-old kidnap victim, Madeleine McCann.

And now the Potter saga is about to end. The seventh and last of the Hogwarts chronicles, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is published on 21 July, with the kind of fanfare usually associated with transatlantic film premieres. At 00.01 GMT, bookshops all over the UK will sell the book to millions of midnight-rambling children and their indulgent parents. In London, there'll be an all-night signing and special live readings from the work at the Natural History Museum, where 1,700 invited guests will strive to shake the author's hand. Then the nation will curl up to find out whether Harry can find and destroy the last of the Horcruxes, the scattered shards of Voldemort's soul, and track down the murderous Professor Snape, currently on the run with Draco Malfoy, and somehow save Hogwarts itself from the sinister interventions of the Ministry of Magic. If none of this means (or matters) a row of beans to you, what have you been doing for the last 10 years?

The hot question is, of course: What now for JK Rowling? How can she possibly top the best-selling children's books in history? How can she match the weight of expectations about her next move? Will she write something quite unexpected - a history of the Franco-Prussian war, say, or a grown-up three-decker family saga set in Scotland? (Either would, of course, become a massive best-seller.) One imagines the senior management at her publishers, Bloomsbury, sitting around the boardroom table, gently trying to steer her towards a new seven-part childhood chronicle, but without becoming too, you know, insistent about it - nobody is likely to apply pressure to the glamorous goose that has laid seven enormous golden eggs. In fact, so nervous are they of giving the slightest offence to their star author, nobody at her publishers or her agent's office will talk to the press about Jo Rowling at all.

The author herself has supplied a bulletin of sorts about her next publications: an eighth Potter book, gathering together all her unpublished material to make an encyclopedia of the Harry world. She's also written "a few short stories" and, for younger readers, "a political fairy story" about a monster, but she knows that's not what everyone wants to know. That's just flannel and dross, a holding pattern. What everyone wants to know is the nature and dimensions of the new universe - not so much a book or book series as a whole planetary system - she will next create in which her billions of readers can live and lose themselves for the foreseeable future.