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1. She wrote some of Harry Potter in a public toilet

Rowling and Armitage share stories of their favourite places to write. While Rowling says her ideal writing spot is “a room with a view”, she’s learned to write anywhere. She was working on Harry Potter when her daughter was very small, and she had to grab writing opportunities where she could. “I could only really work when my daughter was asleep,” she says. “She would fall asleep and I’d think, ‘I’ve got an hour’.” She says she owes to her daughter Jessica her ability to focus, to the point that she is now able to write anywhere at all. “I read about writers having elaborate rituals – light the candles; they have to be in a perfect space – and… I once wrote a paragraph of Harry Potter while sitting on a public loo.” No, she won’t say where the loo was.

2. Harry Potter began life in a little flowery notebook

Every guest on the podcast is asked to bring in a meaningful object. Rowling reveals that her meaningful objects have only been seen by three people in the whole world. They’re the notebooks in which she first jotted ideas for Harry Potter. “I bought these in an art gallery in the early ’90s,” she says. “One’s got a reproduction of… a Dutch still life [on the cover] and one’s just got a William Morris-type cover.” They’re full of ideas for Potter, including thoughts for spell names, scattered among general notes. “There are old phone numbers in Portugal (where she used to live), doodles, reminders of things. Then suddenly, you’ve got a bit of dialogue that actually did end up in Philosopher’s Stone.” One of the books also contains the original name of Dumbledore, “but I’m not going to tell you, because it’s rubbish.”

3. She still reads her reviews

Many successful authors will tell you they stop reading critics’ reviews fairly early in their career, but Rowling says she’s always read them. “A good review is something you learn from,” she says. “I’ve always felt that. Good or bad. Certainly not all reviews… but interesting or thoughtful reviews.” She says part of the reason she wrote her Cormoran Strike novels under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith was because “a lot of [reviewers] were reviewing me, and the phenomenon, and how much money I have… and I just had this craving for what I look back on very fondly.” She wanted to be judged on her own merits. “I wanted to go back to getting an honest rejection letter.”

4. The name J.K. Rowling was used in part to avoid her first husband

I鈥檝e never actually said [this] before, but I actually wanted to be published under a completely different name.

J. K. Rowling

The well-known story goes that the reason the Harry Potter books are published under the name J.K. Rowling, rather than Joanne Rowling, is because the publishers didn’t think boys would buy a book written by a woman. While that’s true, Rowling says there was another reason she didn’t use her real name. “I’ve never actually said [this] before, but I actually wanted to be published under a completely different name,” she says. “I’d come out of this very difficult marriage. I was a little bit paranoid… because my ex-husband knew what I’d been writing… so if he ever heard about it, I suppose he would know it was me.” Rowling has said in the past that her first marriage was abusive. “I actually had a restraining order against my ex-husband. As we got nearer publication, I thought ‘maybe I will just publish under a different name’.” She had another pen name in mind, with the last name Oliver, before deciding to use a more formal version of her real name.

5. She couldn’t have written the Harry Potter series if she’d known how famous she’d become

Rowling repeatedly says how grateful she is for her fans, but also says fame comes with a lot of pressure and fear. When the first Harry Potter book became successful, she became a personality and newspapers and fans wanted to know more about her. “This is not what was supposed to happen. I found it incredibly scary… My little dream had been that one day I would hand over my credit card in a shop and someone would say, ‘Oh my god, you wrote my favourite book.’ That was my fantasy. I never expected to be papped on a beach.” When it began, she thought the attention would be short-lived. “If you told me… this would be 30 years, I’m not sure I could have written the second book.”

6. Ending Harry Potter felt like a bereavement

Rowling spent 17 years of her life writing the Harry Potter series. Losing it from her life hit her hard. “I felt bereft, utterly bereft,” she says. “The thing the reader can never know is how much it gave you; how much strength it gave you, to have that place to support you. Potter had seen me through the death of my marriage, the birth of my child.” When Rowling finished the final book, her second husband, Neil, took her to Venice. “We’re sitting at breakfast and he’s beaming across the table, and I just burst into tears… I said to him, ‘It feels like a bereavement’.”

7. The dementors were inspired by a childhood nightmare

The dementors, the terrifyingly ghostly guards of Azkaban in the Harry Potter novels, were, Rowling says, made to “embody depression,” which she has suffered with in her life. “It is cathartic to take those things and turn them into fiction.” While that was a deliberate choice, she says she only realised later that there was a second inspiration. “I realised subsequently that their appearance owed everything to a dream I’d had when I was a child… I had a dream… that I was hiding from a creature that looked like a dementor: the empty black cloak and the withered hand. It was sort of drifting toward me. It didn’t seem to have feet. I was terrified.”

8. Nothing terrified her more than the 2012 Olympics

Of all the things Rowling has done, she says nothing has frightened her so much as doing a reading at the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. “Literally the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done.” However, she also remembers 2012 as a lovely year, because it’s when she came up with the idea for her next book, The Christmas Pig. “I was working on the idea on a holiday just before the Olympic opening ceremony,” she says. She describes it as “a short book for younger children” about a toy pig. “He speaks, and other things speak, which you might not expect.”

To find out more, listen to The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed: J.K. Rowling.