J. K. Rowling

Joanne Kathleen Rowling was an author only in potential when she sat at a table in an Edinburgh cafe writing of Harry Potter, the boy who lived. The first of the fantastically popular Harry Potter books was completed with the aid of a grant from the Scottish Arts Council. Nobody could ever have forseen the worldwide following which sprang from those humble origins. Four books into the series of an intended seven, and J.K. Rowling is a household name across the USA and much of Europe.
Born in Chepstow, Gwent in 1965, J.K. Rowling attended Exeter University, worked as a secretary and then a teacher before a period of unemployment gave forth the first in the Harry Potter series. She and her husband divorced shortly after her daughter's birth, and during the writing of The Philosopher's Stone mother and daughter lived in a tiny Edinburgh flat.

Current life and family
In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious 19th-century estate house, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Rowling also owns a home in Morningside, Edinburgh, and a Georgian style house in London, on a street where, according to The Guardian, the average price of a house is £4.27 million ($8 million), possibly including an underground swimming pool and 24-hour security.
On 26 December 2001, Rowling married Dr. Neil Murray, an anaesthetist, in a private ceremony at her home in Aberfeldy. Their son David Gordon Rowling Murray was born shortly after Rowling began writing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Rowling took a break from working on the novel to care for him in his early infancy. Rowling's youngest child, Mackenzie Jean Rowling Murray, to whom she dedicated Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was born in January of 2005.