(Credit: Telegraph article, June 2017, J.K. Rowling at the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation party in 2007, wearing a floral diamond necklace and matching earrings, cf., Christmas Pig)
Solomon Schmidt, author of A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J. K. Rowling (Skyhorse, June 2026), sat down with us again to discuss what challenges he faced in collating and synthesizing almost thirty years of interviews for his biography. He also shares the three questions he’d ask The Presence if she’d consent to an interview, questions that he thinks she might answer; Solomon turned the tables on his interviewers who had to improv questions they’d ask without being told their interview with Rowling was over.
The necessary links to the book’s Amazon page and to the two Hogwarts Professor reviews are here:
A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling (Amazon.com)
A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling (Amazon.co.uk) Uk Edition
A Pen to Change the World – the Biography of J. K. Rowling by Solomon Schmidt (Nick Jeffery)
Book Review: A Pen to Change the World - The Life of J. K. Rowling (John Granger)
5. I said you didn’t get to interview Rowling, which is true, but you did have access to all her interviews that she has done 1997 to the present as well as the interviews and articles with her family, friends, fans, and business associates. How did you find, assemble, and sift through those interviews? 6. If you had been allowed inside the gates of Fortress Rowling and you were only allowed three questions, what would you ask her? (This is a game John and I regularly play, and usually John’s questions would get him thrown out of an interview!) 7. What discoveries that you made in your research were the most exciting to you? 8. Rowling has said repeatedly through the years that the critical negative events of her life that reshaped her thinking and her work were the death of her mother and the abusive relationship she had with her first husband. Agree or disagree? What do you think were the most important positive turns in her life? 9. Very few people I meet don’t have a fixed opinion about Rowling; the world seems to love and hate her in equal measure with little grey area between the two: adoring fans and political allies on the one hand and those that despise her work, her political efforts, or both. Where do you fall in that divide and how hard was it to represent the other point of view in your biography? 10. I assume you’ve started researching your next biography though you’ll be neck deep in this book’s launch for a few months. What will you be working on next?
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