The Books

1. In The Goblet of Fire, there is a character called Natalie McDonald. A heart-warming story is behind her... Natalie was a real nine-year-old girl who was a huge Harry Potter fan. She had incurable leukaemia however, and knew she did not have long to live. Natalie wrote to JK Rowling to ask her what happened in the next book, but sadly by the time JK Rowling wrote back Natalie had died of her illness - so Rowling immortalised Natalie in the book.
2. JK Rowling’s birthday is on the same day as Harry’s.
3. There are more differences than you might think between the American and British versions of the books. Not only was ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ changed to ‘Sorcerer’s Stone’, but English phrases such as ‘sneakers’, ‘jumper’ and ‘car park’ were changed to ‘trainers’, ‘sweater’ and ‘parking lot’.
4. Joanna ‘JK’ Rowling does not actually have a middle name - the ‘K’ is taken from her grandmother’s name, Kathleen.
5. The books have been translated into 67 languages - including Latin.
6. Rowling got a number of the ‘medieval’ sounding words from Harry Potter (such as ‘toadflax’) from a famous real book written in the 1600s called Culpepper’s Complete Herbal.
7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the fastest-selling book of all time - 11 million copies were shifted on the day it was released.
8. On the day The Prisoner of Azkaban was released, Bloomsbury (the publisher) asked stores not to put the book on sale until schools closed - in a bid to stop children playing truant to buy it!
9. A handwritten copy of JK Rowling’s Tales of Beedle the Bard sold for 4 million dollars!
10. More than 450 million Harry Potter books have been sold in total.