JK Rowling refuses to discuss family in Career of Evil interview: 'I don't feel I owe my readers details of my family's private life'

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JK Rowling has refused to discuss her private life during an interview after being asked if her family has paid a price for her fame.

The Harry Potter author spoke to NPR about writing under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith to promote her new book, Career of Evil.

Rowling is an active Twitter user who regularly engages with fans and spars with trolls. However, she rarely gives interviews and has gone to great lengths to keep her domestic life out of the media.

Rowling won a landmark ruling banning photographs of her son in 2008 after pictures were taken using a covert long-lens camera when he was 19 months old. In 2011, she told the Leveson Inquiry that she had been forced to take action against newspapers dozens of times for breaching her privacy.

David Greene spoke to Rowling for the Morning Edition, where she explained why she guarded her private life so fiercely after being asked how fame affected her family.

She said: “There's going to be debate around this as long as there are writers. Some readers and commentators really want to scrape your insides out to make sense of your work. Others say, there's the work, it speaks for itself.

“Personally, I fall somewhere in the middle. I think it's difficult to be honest about certain aspects of my work without acknowledging that I have experienced or felt or questioned certain of the themes in the books.

“But at the same time, I don't feel I owe my readers details of my family's private life, for example. So I'm happy to talk in general themes, but when we get down to specifics about my family, for me that's always been off-limits. Of course, if my kids grow up and they want to write memoirs about what it was like, then that's their right, and they should feel free to do it, and we may yet see J.K. Dearest! But until then, I'm going to protect them.”

Rowling also disclosed a development that has excited Harry Potter fans across the world: there is another children’s book is in the pipeline.