Jo wanted to be a writer from an early age. “I was your basic common-or-garden bookworm, complete with freckles and National Health spectacles.” The young Jo grew up surrounded by books. Anne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when Jo was a teenager and died in 1990, before the Harry Potter books were published. Her father, Peter, was an aircraft engineer at the Rolls Royce factory in Bristol and her mother, Anne, was a science technician in the Chemistry department at Wyedean Comprehensive, where Jo herself went to school. Joanne Rowling was born on 31st July 1965 at Yate General Hospital near Bristol, and grew up in Gloucestershire in England and in Chepstow, Gwent, in south-east Wales.