J.K. Rowling turns sixty today

The question of how rich Joan Rowling is (it is clear that she is the richest writer in the history of literature) is not simple - in different years her fortune was estimated in the range from $650 million to $2.2 billion. The thing is that her main income in recent years was brought not so much by literature, but by film adaptations of her books and Broadway theater productions based on them.

And now they have been supplemented by money (the figure is not named), which Rowling was supposed to receive for the epic series of her "Potteriana", the filming of which has already begun - along with a noisy advertising campaign. HBO plans to adapt each of Rowling's seven novels about Harry Potter in one television season, so the young actors, whose names have already been announced and photographs have been presented, can, on the one hand, be envied, and on the other - pitied.

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Naturally, envy their future fame, and feel sorry for them because they won't have a childhood (they'll even be taught in a special school), and, most importantly, that after the series ends, they may well face a path from world fame to obscurity.

We remember this because the heroes and heroines of the Harry Potter films have already gone down this path. Of course, it can't be said that Radcliffe and Watson's acting careers were not successful at all, but this is nowhere near the fame they received as children thanks to their participation in films based on Rowling's novels.

And since actors are people under pressure, unlike Rowling, they had to somehow maneuver in accordance with current (now, "under Trump", we can already add - "yesterday's") ideological trends, and accuse their "godmother" of ignoring the rights of transgender people. This did not add any roles to them, and it was unlikely to arouse sympathy among the mass audience (if they even noticed it).

Also, in the "pre-Trump" period, Western media persistently created the impression among readers that the author of the Harry Potter books was ostracized in the world of culture because of her statements about transgenderism. However, all this collapsed, again, as soon as it became known about the epic series, where Joan Rowling would also be an executive producer. And, apparently, not nominally, as happens in Hollywood - so, she has already praised the scripts of the first two episodes, which means that she is really in the works.

And finally, it is impossible not to mention that Rowling's literary fate (today, probably everyone already knows that the manuscript of the first "Harry Potter" was rejected by about a dozen publishers) is evidence that real talent has a chance to succeed.

By the time she finished the first novel of the Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone series, Rowling, by her own admission, considered herself the world's biggest loser - she fled Portugal, where she was being abused by her husband, with a small child in her arms, to live with relatives in Scotland, where she continued to be afraid of him (and he did come, as a result of which he received a court order to keep him away from Rowling and her daughter), lived on welfare and continued writing her first novel. She wrote mostly in a cafe that belonged to her son-in-law, since her little daughter fell asleep best during a walk to it.

Now all this is behind her, Rowling is rich - and by writer's standards, fantastically rich, so rich that she may never write again, which is, by the way, the dream of many writers - but, by all indications, she loves to write.

After the start of Russia's full-scale armed invasion of Ukraine, Rowling was one of the first to donate and help raise money to help Ukrainian children. In May 2022, the Lumos charity she founded raised £1 million for this purpose. The foundation also provided Ukrainian children with food, medicine, and medical consultations. In addition, Rowling then opened free access to the Potter books in Ukrainian translation on her official website.