JK Rowling releases chapters of new book online
JK Rowling wanted to do something to help kids and their parents through the coronavirus lockdown, and the Harry Potter author’s teenage children knew just what she should do.
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British author JK Rowling has published a new story called The Ickabog, which will be free to read online to help entertain children and families stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic.
The superstar Harry Potter author said on Tuesday (local time) she wrote the fairytale for her children as a bedtime story over a decade ago. Set in an imaginary land, it is a stand-alone story “about truth and the abuse of power” for children from seven to nine years old and is unrelated to Rowling’s other books.
Rowling said the draft of the story had stayed in her attic while she focused on writing books for adults. She said her children, now teenagers, were “touchingly enthusiastic” when she recently suggested retrieving the story and publishing it for free.
“Over time I came to think of it as a story that belonged to my two younger children, because I’d read it to them in the evenings when they were little, which has always been a happy family memory,” she wrote on her website.
“For the last few weeks I’ve been immersed in a fictional world I thought I’d never enter again. As I worked to finish the book, I started reading chapters nightly to the family again,” she said.
Over time I came to think of The Ickabog as just for my family. The manuscript went up into the attic, where it remained until a few weeks ago.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 26, 2020
This is the very dusty box I got down from the attic.
(It's a Net-A-Porter box and might well have held a premiere dress.)
4/13 pic.twitter.com/vg8F5Qx33M
“The Ickabog’s first two readers told me what they remember from when they were tiny, and demanded the reinstatement of bits they’d particularly liked (I obeyed).”
The first two chapters were posted online on Tuesday (local time) at The Ickabog website, with daily instalments to follow until July 10.
The book will be published in print later this year, and Rowling said she will pledge royalties from its sales to projects helping those particularly affected by the pandemic.
The first two chapters, which went online on Tuesday, introduced King Fred the Fearless, ruler of Cornucopia, and five-year-old Bert Beamish.
Readers also learned about the myth of a fearsome monster called The Ickabog, which is “said to eat children and sheep”.