Time's Author of the Year - JK Rowling

[heidi tandy]

No: HPFGUIDX 7217

The article & a pic of her in a hooded cloak are at 
http://www.time.com/time/poy2000/mag/rowling.html

Here's the part I thought we'd like least: Her agent has said that 
Book 5 won't be out before 2002 : ( but we will have the Quidditch & 
Magical Beasts books out this spring, and hopefully will be able to 
find enough little glimmers in there to keep us happy. I'm hoping 
that in the Quidditch book there will be a little bit on Charlie 
Weasley and (crosses fingers, hypothesizingly) a description of the 
Hogwarts Quidditch Cup Battle On 1977, involving James Potter, Sirius 
Black, Lucius Malfoy and Severus Snape in varying degrees of 
competition (maybe? perhaps?).  Looks like we're going to have to 
rely on fanfiction to keep us going....I bet there'll be over 70,000 
stories on ff.net by the time book 5 comes out (and cassandra will 
crash the server another 90 times!)

Here's the part I thought we'd like most:
And it's not only young people who love the Harry Potter books; they 
have been eagerly adopted by uncounted adults and have prompted 
serious academic attention. Vance Smith, an assistant professor of 
English at Princeton University who is spending this year as a 
visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein's old 
bailiwick, has just delivered a lecture called "Harry Potter and This 
Ever-Changing Medieval World" to an alumni seminar. He praises, among 
other things, Rowling's clever use of Latin and her "important and 
rigorous medieval agenda." Not since Charles Dickens has a novelist 
writing in English achieved Rowling's command over a whole society
‹young and not so young, of modest means and with money to flambé‹and 
the Dickens analogy quickly outlives its usefulness. None of his 
novels were simultaneous best sellers in dozens of languages; the 
19th century world was a markedly slower place than our own. And 
Dickens' audience had none of the distractions that beguile Rowling's 
readers: no radio, films, recorded music, TV, video and computer 
games, the Internet. For years, literary culture has been portrayed 
as gasping on life support, sustained only by old-fogey teachers and 
hidebound school curricula. The death of the author was surely at 
hand. And then along came Rowling.