JK Rowling: all about me

'This undoubtedly contributed to the fact that we spent about three-quarters of our childhood fighting like a pair of wildcats.'

Miss Rowling admits that thanks to their childhood scraps, her sister still bears a mark on her forehead - but does not say whether it gave her the inspiration for Harry's lightning-shaped scar.

'To this day, Di bears a tiny scar just above her eyebrow from the cut I gave her when I threw a battery at her - but I didn't expect to hit her, I thought she'd duck!' she said.

'This excuse didn't cut much ice with my mother, who was angrier than I had ever seen her.' When Miss Rowling was nine, the family moved to Tutshill, Gloucestershire, to fulfil a dream of 'living in the country'.

At the same time her grandmother, Kathleen, died. Years later, when asked by her publisher to provide a second initial to her name (apparently it sounded more mysterious than plain Joanne) Miss Rowling chose 'K' in her memory.

It was at Wyedean Secondary School - where she was obsessed with the Bay City Rollers - that the 11-year-old Joanne met Sean Harris.

Throughout school, the pair were inseparable. Sean, to whom the Chamber of Secrets is dedicated, owned a Ford Anglia (a car which readers of the books will find familiar).

'That turquoise and white car meant FREEDOM and no more having to ask my father to give me lifts, which is the worst thing about living in the countryside when you are a teenager,' she recalls.

'Some of the happiest memories of my teenage years are zooming off into the darkness in Sean's car.'

When Joanne was 15, her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

'The worst thing that happened during my teenage years was my mother becoming ill,' she says, talking about her loss for the first time.

'Although most people with multiple sclerosis experience periods of remission, mum was unlucky; from the time of her diagnosis onwards she seemed to become slowly but steadily worse.

'I think most people believe, deep down, that their mother are indestructible; it was a terrible shock to hear that she had an incurable illness.'

Anne Rowling's death in December 1990, she says, was a hammer blow. 'My father, Di and I were devastated; she was only 45 years old and we could never have imagined - probably because we could not bear the idea - that she could die so young. I remember feeling as though there was a paving- slab pressing down on my chest, a literal pain in my heart.'

To escape her grief, Miss Rowling says, she went travelling in Europe. She brushes over her brief and acrimonious marriage to a Portuguese journalist, but says: 'It had given me the best thing in my life, Jessica.'

She briefly worked for the human rights group Amnesty International but never felt a strong sense of what she wanted to do until inspiration struck on day on a train between Manchester and London.

'The idea for Harry Potter just fell into my head,' she said. 'I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but had never been so excited about an idea before. To my immense frustration, I didn't have a functioning pen with me, and I was too shy to ask anyone if I could borrow one.

'I think, now, that this was probably a good thing, because I simply sat and thought for four (delayed train) hours, and all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me.

'I think perhaps if I had to slow down the ideas to capture them on paper I might have stifled them (although sometimes I do wonder, idly, how much of what I imagined on that journey I had forgotten by the time I actually got my hands on a pen).'

The website even includes a copy of her first rejection letter. It was just two sentences long.

'Dear Ms. Rowling,' it said. 'I am sorry but my client list is full. PS. The folder you sent would not fit in the envelope.'

Her second attempt was more fruitful - although it still took her literary agent, Christopher Little, more than a year to find a publisher for her work. She finally received an offer from Bloomsbury in August 1996.

Among the more startling revelations on the website is that when she recently logged into a Harry Potter chatroom and attempted to reveal a few of the plots she had planned for the seventh and final Harry Potter book, 'nobody was remotely interested'.

Miss Rowling does, however, tease her young fans that she might try again to sign on to the MuggleNet site. 'Look out for the user name Squidward,' she says.