• Wion
  • /Entertainment
  • /JK Rowling new book termed transphobic, author denies character based on her life experience - Entertainment News

JK Rowling new book termed transphobic, author denies character based on her life experience

JK Rowling new book termed transphobic, author denies character based on her life experience

JK Rowling received death threat on Twitter

JK Rowling's new book is courting controversy even before its release. Rowling's new book 'The Ink Black Heart' has been termed transphobic with one of the main charactersbearing eerie similaritiesto Rowling.

The author has now denied that the character has been written inspired by her own experience. The character in the book dies after being persecuted online by trolls after one of the cartoons he has created is termed as racist, ableist, and transphobic. Rowling has written the book under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

During a recent online session, Rowling denied that the controversial character was based on her own experience. Rowling has in the past been termed transphobic by LGBTQ+ advocates and multiple stars from the 'Harry Potter' franchise. She claimed to have received death threats even. Rowling stated that the concept for the book came long before she was criticized for her views.

"I have never created a book – and this book certainly isn’t created from my own experience – you know, with a view to talking about my own life," she wrote online. "That doesn’t mean, of course, that your own life experience isn’t in the book."JK Rowling's new book's plot may seem too familiar to readers. Here's why

Answering as her pen name, Rowling wrote, "With this book – I had been planning this book for so long and then a couple of the things that happen in this book have since happened to me. And so, I would like to be very clear that I haven’t written this book as an answer to anything that happened to me.

"Although I have to say when it did happen to me, those who had already read the book in manuscript form were – are you clairvoyant? I wasn’t clairvoyant, I just – yeah, it was just one of those weird twists. Sometimes life imitates art more than one would like."

But, no, it’s not – this isn’t about my experience of – as being a creator. My experience – if I wrote about my experience as a creator, it would look very different. And I have to say, for example – which I think will be a question readers would ask: the Potter fandom, by and large, has been amazing to me. Incredibly supportive and I still receive tonnes of love from the Potter fandom.

"So, the fandom in this book is very much not a portrait of the fandom. It is of a very – I think a very different kind of fandom," Rowling added.

Add WION as a Preferred Source

In the recent past, Rowling has claimed that the similarities between her and the character in the book are mere coincidences.

Rowling spoke to Graham Norton last week and said, "I should make it really clear after some of the things that have happened the last year that this is not depicting (that)."

"I had written the book before certain things happened to me online," she continued. "I said to my husband, 'I think everyone is going to see this as a response to what happened to me,' but it genuinely wasn't. The first draft of the book was finished at the point certain things happened."

About the Author

Share on twitter

Shomini Sen

Shomini has written on entertainment and lifestyle for most of her career. Having watched innumerable Bollywood potboilers of the 1990s, writing for cinema came as an easy option t...Read More