Harry Potter author says she felt "threatened" by media attention

Nov 24, 2011, 16:11 GMT

London - Harry Potter author Joanne K. Rowling told a British media inquiry Thursday she felt 'threatened' when her sudden fame exposed her to constant 'surveillance' by the press.

'When you become very well known - and I was shocked how quickly I became so well known in such a short time - no-one gives you a guide book. You have to make it up to an extent yourself,' said Rowling.

'I did not know I was going to receive so much press attention,' said the author, describing how she had to move house after two years in 1999 to escape media attention, and at times felt 'trapped' in her home.

In her vivid but composed account to an inquiry into media ethics and practices, the 46-year-old author said her home in Edinburgh, Scotland, was besieged by reporters bent on taking photographs of her and her three children.

On one occasion in the early stages of her writing career, a magazine had asked to take a photograph of 'my broken down typewriter and my daughter on my knee.'

When she declined, the session was cancelled.

When her oldest daughter, Jessica, came home from school with a letter from a journalist placed in her satchel, asking for an interview, she felt a sickening 'sense of invasion.'

'I realized that for my 5-five-year-old daughter, the school was not the place of complete security any more.'

Later, when secret photographs were taken of her daughter during a private family holiday in Mauritius, she said: 'Unlike a story in print, for which you can expect an apology, an image can spread around the world like a virus. Images have a life that cannot be recalled.'