Joanne Rowling is a author, film producer, television producer, screenwriter, and philanthropist.She is best known for writing the fantasy series, which has won multiple awards and sold more than 500 million copies, becoming the best-selling book series in history.The books are the basis of a popular film series, over which Rowling had overall approval on the scripts and was a producer on the final films.Born in , Gloucestershire, Rowling was working as a and for Amnesty International when she conceived the idea for the Harry Potter series while on a delayed train from Manchester to London in 1990.The seven-year period that followed saw the death of her mother, birth of her first child, divorce from her first husband, and relative poverty until the first novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was published in 1997. There were sequels, of which the last, Harry Potter and the , was released in .