Romance for Harry in the last Potter novels, says Rowling
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Your support makes all the difference.Romance and a horrible death will figure in future Harry Potter books, says the wizard's creator, JK Rowling. In her first in-depth television interview, to be broadcast on Friday, Ms Rowling reflects on the Potter phenomenon, the books and the film, and gives heavy hints on what is going to happen to Harry and his friends.
That, she tells the BBC1 Omnibus programme, will involve romance, exciting new locations and deaths. "More boy-girl stuff, inevitably," she says. "They're 15, hormones working overtime. And Harry has to ask questions that I hope the reader will think, 'Well, why hasn't he asked this before?'
Harry finds out a lot more about his past. "You get into locations you've never been before. But they've been mentioned already. So people could guess rightly where we're going in book five. So Harry gets to go to places in the magical world we haven't yet visited.
"I'm puzzled by the fact that people say, 'Oh, you're going to kill people.' I really don't think you need too much insight to guess that death and murder are always a possibility in the world. More people are going to die. And there's at least one death that's going to be horrible to write."
Ms Rowling also allows the cameras to see what Potter fans and auction houses would love to get their hands on, the final chapter of book seven, last book in the series, which has already been written. "I'm not going to say I'll never write anything to do with the world of Hogwarts ever again," she says. "I have often thought [if I wrote] book eight, it would be right and proper to be a book whose royalties go to charity entirely. It could be the encyclopaedia of the world [of Hogwarts] and I could rid myself of every last lurking detail. But no, not a novel."
Ms Rowling also admits that when she was planning the first book her memory let her down about the famous train platform from which the Hogwarts Express departs. "I wrote platform nine and three-quarters because I came up with the idea when I was living in Manchester and I wrongly visualised the platforms.
"I was actually thinking of Euston, so anyone who's actually been to the real platforms nine and 10 in King's Cross [station] will realise they don't bear a great resemblance to the platforms nine and 10 in the book. I was thinking of Euston at the time. So that's just me coming clean there. I was in Manchester, so I couldn't check."
Ms Rowling also talks about fame. "I think I'm very bad at being famous. I never expected it and I never wanted it. The height, the absolute height of my ambition was that one day I'd write a cheque in a shop or something, and someone would say, 'Rowling? But you wrote my favourite book.' That was my idea of being well-known."
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