How this shocking image of a boy in a cage fuelled JK Rowling’s extraordinary philanthropy
‘My first reaction was to turn the page’ says the Harry Potter author — but in the end she couldn’t look away. The inside story of how a little boy, locked inside a cage, led her to donate more than $400 million.
She was reading The Sunday Times in the summer of 2004 when a photograph stopped JK Rowling in her tracks. It showed a small, shaven-headed boy, about five years old, his face pressed against the wire of what looked like a cage. “My initial reaction was to turn the page,” she says, sitting at her kitchen table amid the homely comforts of an Aga and duck-egg-blue Shaker-style units. “But I told myself I had to read the article and, if it was as bad as the photo made it look, I needed to do something about it.”
The story was harrowing. “The screaming starts at 11am sharp each day in the basement of the Raby care home, near Prague,” the venerable British newspaper reported after visiting one of the hundreds of archaic “orphanages” that were a cruel remnant of Soviet rule. “That is when a little boy called Vasek Knotek is locked in his cage.” For a brief period each morning Vasek, who was disabled – no one knew his real age – was let out to be fed and washed then forced back inside, his wails of anger and despair echoing through the building.
“I know I’m hardly unusual in this, but I have a particularly visceral reaction to seeing children abandoned, abused and alone,” says Rowling, 59. “The image of that little boy screaming through what looked like chicken wire was so distressing. It remains burnt into my brain. I was pregnant with my youngest and I think it hit me all the harder because of that.” She has three children: Jessica, 31, David, 22, and Mackenzie, 20.
She was also parkway through writing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in the hit series that catapulted her into being the most famous children’s writer in the world. It didn’t stop her from lobbying both the Czech ambassador to the UK and the Czech prime minister. She also wrote letters to Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne – a Member of the European Parliament and a former director of fundraising for Save the Children, who had set up a charity to help abandoned children in Romanian orphanages – and a year later they formed the Children’s High Level Group charity together. It was renamed Lumos in 2010, after a charm in Rowling’s books that illuminates the end of a wand, shining light into the darkest of places.
In the 21 years since Vasek’s story was published Rowling has donated £63 million [$132 million] to Lumos, either directly or via the Harry Potter franchise, helping more than 280,000 children not just in eastern Europe but also in Haiti, Colombia and Ukraine. All this and much, much more. The Sunday Times calculates that Rowling has donated almost £200 million [$419 million] to three main causes: Lumos, the Volant Charitable Trust and the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic. This has happened out of sight. She rarely gives interviews and has never talked about the full scope of her philanthropy before.
We are speaking a few days before she goes on holiday and before the Supreme Court ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law – a judgment she toasted with a cigar and a cocktail from her yacht in the Bahamas. It was a verdict that trans campaigners said left them “distressed” and “devastated”.
Back in her Edinburgh kitchen, with a clock that has stopped at 12 and wouldn’t be out of place at Hogwarts, she is solicitous and kind and talks at a hundred miles an hour. Her auburn hair is scraped back, tinted aviator spectacles perched on her nose; her fingers, tipped with an ice-blue manicure, are wrapped around a vape, on which she puffs furiously.
Visiting institutions around eastern Europe with Lumos, she saw first-hand the need for action in the first year of a child’s life. “When that door closes, it’s very hard for children to develop into emotionally stable, functioning adults,” she says. “We now have 80 years of meticulous international research to show that institutionalised children have vastly poorer outcomes than children raised in families. So intervention is critical, and the earlier the better. Neglect not only causes cognitive harm, it exposes children to a higher risk of abuse and exploitation.”
She remembers a little girl of about five who sat on her lap during a meeting at a Czech orphanage near Prague and beamed up at her. “A child who has been properly nurtured and is securely attached would never sit in the lap of a complete stranger. I was emotional and trying to hold it together while talking with experts in the room. I was stuck on the fact that this child was giving me a visceral demonstration of why it’s so easy to abuse – and traffic – an institutionalised child. She had been deprived of every child’s birthright. She was so desperate for love, for attention, that she would have gone home with anyone, no question.”
We pause for a moment over this troubling scene. I adopted a child who had been traumatised early in life, and Rowling tells me she too came very close to taking a child home. She has never forgotten her and is visibly upset thinking about her again. “It was in a unit in Bucharest [in Romania] in 2006, where all these tiny babies were completely silent. I tried to make eye contact with one beautiful little girl who must have been four or five months old, and there was nothing. She’d learnt that when she cried, no one came, so she’d stopped crying. She was completely shut down. It really, really upset me. I had a very strong impulse to pick up that baby and take her home. I’ve never completely got over that.”
Rowling’s response was instinctive and understandable. But the little girl’s situation was complicated. Like 80 per cent of abandoned children, she had a living mother. “The question I’ve met a ton of times from westerners and donors is, ‘Why do they abandon them?’” Rowling says. “Social, political and economic upheaval all influence the numbers of children who are put into institutions, but grinding poverty is the number one driver. Lumos has worked hard to put systems in place where people can keep their children and feed them and educate them. Mothers don’t give their children up if they’re in a position to raise them within a family.”
Rowling, who describes herself as “a very earnest, Hermioneish child, aspiring to right the world’s wrongs”, grew up in Chepstow in southeast Wales. The family didn’t have a lot of money. Her father, Peter, who was an aircraft engineer at the Rolls-Royce factory in Bristol, made no secret of the fact that he’d have preferred a boy. Her mother, Anne, was a science technician at Rowling’s comprehensive school. “You’d probably call us lower middle class, but we had all we needed,” she says.
At school, though, she met kids who didn’t have everything they needed. “There were families who couldn’t afford full school uniforms. I saw and hated the kind of caste system that results from those conspicuous differences. I don’t think those things ever leave you. All of that shaped my world-view and informs the kind of causes and issues I want to help.”
She has a strong memory of “stuffing coins into one of those awful metal lifesize-child-in-callipers-shaped collecting boxes that used to stand outside shops. I don’t know whether that was the first time I donated money,” she says. “But it must have been fairly early on because I wasn’t much taller than the box.”
However, it was as a young woman escaping an abusive, short-lived marriage that Rowling experienced soul-sapping poverty herself. In the noisy frenzy of the culture wars, Rowling’s private pain can be overlooked. She arrived in Edinburgh from Portugal in 1993 when Jessica was four months old, with one suitcase containing the first three chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. In her 2008 Harvard commencement speech, she said that she had been “as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless”. Today she tells me: “Nobody who hasn’t been poor can understand what it means. I remember it vividly; you never forget it. The poor get talked about, talked down to, talked over – and all of that happened to me during those years.”
Some of the rage Rowling felt then is obvious in her voice now when I ask her to explain further.
“I literally went hungry at times because I prioritised feeding my daughter, but that wasn’t the worst of it. It’s the daily indignities – overwhelmingly, not being able to give your child the things you’d like. I remember meeting another mum whose son was the same age as my daughter. He had a roomful of toys. I had a shoebox in which Jessica’s two toys lived. It’s that kind of thing that really gets to you.”
Rowling still seems to be confounded by her own success. “I’d have had to have psychotic levels of self-belief to imagine my book would be a bestseller.” She’d been warned by her literary agent to find a job because the story wasn’t commercial enough. In publicity pictures around this time Rowling looks exhausted, very nearly defeated. “To say I wasn’t successful doesn’t even come close,” she says. “Of everyone I knew, I was the person who’d messed up the worst. Once you’re in that situation it is very difficult to climb out. That feeling of living from benefit cheque to benefit cheque is horrendous. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I wanted to work but I could not afford to wait a month before I got a pay cheque because I had no money to feed us.”
That first book, published by Bloomsbury in June 1997, became one of the bestselling works of fiction of all time. She was 32. But with sudden fame came the letters, which she found incredibly difficult to deal with. Over the years she has learnt to do due diligence, “to make sure the money is reaching the right places. But for years it was just me, then me and a PA. The postbag once included a begging letter from a Lloyd’s [investor] who’d lost a lot of money in 2005. They told me how lucky I was to have grown up poor, so I’d never know the agony of losing a fortune, and asked me to give them money because they and their spouse could no longer afford to go to the opera. I quite understand if people think I’m making that up but I’ve still got the letter somewhere.”
But most of the letters were not funny. Many were from women trying to escape violent and coercive men, asking for relatively small amounts of money. “All genuine, and I was delighted to be able to help,” she says. Rowling has since donated more than £86 million in grants to projects in Scotland and around the world, focusing on social deprivation with particular focus on women and children, who, in her words, “are at risk in their lives, or find themselves in situations where there seems to be no way out”. Volant, the first charity she set up in 2000, supports services for victims of sexual abuse, rape and domestic violence, as well as isolated and lone parents.
She has had to make judgments and decisions that sometimes felt overwhelming. “I definitely got scammed a few times,” she says, drinking from a mug of tea and taking a long chug on her vape. It must have been frightening, I suggest. “It really was,” she says. These days she rarely sees begging letters: “We have a process to deal with them because, honestly, they used to mess me up so much.
“I’m the very last person you’ll hear moaning about becoming suddenly wealthy, especially given the financial situation I was in just before it happened,” she says. “But it’s true that life becomes full of dilemmas you never dreamt of having to deal with.”
One heart-rending letter from parents asking for money to fund surgery for their child sticks in her mind. She had just met Neil Murray, a doctor, who she married in 2001. “I was so upset and disturbed by this letter – they’d included photographs and a lot of medical information – that I showed it to him. That was his baptism by fire into this strange aspect of my life. He said very calmly and compassionately that the reason UK doctors wouldn’t operate is because it would involve a lot of pain for no gain; any doctor who says they’ll do it is entirely motivated by money. He’s a person full of integrity, so that brought my anxiety levels down. And he has continued to be an amazing support, because it can still feel overwhelming.”
In 2020 Rowling donated more than £12 million in royalties from her children’s fairytale, The Ickabog, to Volant, ring-fencing the money to support vulnerable people impacted by Covid-19. And she donates all royalties from the first of her Cormoran Strike detective series, written under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith, to the Army Benevolent Fund. “My fictional hero is a veteran, as is my oldest friend,” she explains. “I wanted to give something back, not just because it’s a good cause but because of the inspiration I derived from actual veterans who let me question them.”
She’s most keen to talk about the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic in Edinburgh, which opened in 2013. This reflects Rowling’s deepest loss. Her mother, Anne, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1980, died aged 45 of related complications in 1990, when Rowling was 25. “Her disease progressed so fast, my mother didn’t even know I was writing Harry Potter,” she says. She never saw the later success, the books, the films, the merchandise or the theme parks – the profits of which are, in part, ploughed back into the centre. Rowling’s donations of £27.8 million to date have allowed the clinic to employ the world’s best clinicians and researchers.
“We do incredible research but we’re also very patient-centred, so people can get on clinical trials – not just for MS but other neurological conditions like motor neurone disease, which have traditionally been underfunded,” she explains. “It honours her [Rowling’s mother] and it honours what she went through.
“My mother was the most amazing gardener. She had really green fingers, which I have not inherited,” Rowling says, laughing. “I chose an image of green shoots for the centre’s logo because I wanted that sense of regrowth – we’re looking at whether we can stimulate nerves to grow correctly – but it also felt like a beautiful tribute to her.”
In 2022 she founded Beira’s Place, a women-only rape and sexual assault support centre in Edinburgh. It is named after the Scottish goddess of winter, who represents female wisdom, power and regeneration.
As a survivor of domestic violence and a serious sexual assault she suffered in her twenties, she is particularly proud of it. “There was no such single-sex service before,” she says. “I know that was well worth doing because of the number of women who are coming through our doors.” Over three years she has donated £1 million to fund running costs, including a staff of nine counselling support workers who have provided more than 6,000 hours of support to 700 women and girls.
Lumos was successful in getting Vasek out of the Raby care home, though data protection laws prevent us from finding out what happened to him. Social services in the Czech Republic have also been transformed. “They stopped using caged beds as a result of our intervention, so that was a triumph,” Rowling says. “I’ve met a ton of children affiliated to Lumos who are now our advocates. They are beyond important voices in the campaign because they really tug at your heartstrings. Their stories are heart-rending.”
An estimated 5.4 million children still live in institutions worldwide. Rowling’s plans for Lumos’s third decade is to do at least twice as much in half the time. “In ten years’ time Lumos aims to have helped enable more than half a million more children and young people to thrive in safe and loving families,” she says.
Coming up to 30 years after Harry Potter changed the face of publishing, she isn’t in the least bit interested in legacy.
“It has always seemed to me to be an entirely futile pursuit, trying to frame the way you’re remembered after you’re dead,” she says. “I care about now and the living. Honestly, all I ever think about with regard to death is that I hope it doesn’t happen too soon because I’d like to stay with my family as long as possible.”
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