In 1990, a young writer named J.K. Rowling was on a delayed train between Manchester and London when an image simply appeared in her mind, almost fully formed: a thin, bespectacled boy who didn’t know he was a wizard. She had no pen at hand, so she spent the entire journey just holding onto that idea, afraid it might slip away before she could write it down. The years that followed weren’t easy — marked by personal and financial hardship — but it was precisely during that unstable period that the world of Harry Potter took shape, written in cafés, among drafts typed out on an old typewriter.
The idea behind the story was, at its core, universal: an ordinary, overlooked, isolated boy discovers he belongs to a secret and extraordinary world — and that there, finally, he is special. Rowling wanted to build not just an adventure, but an entire universe, with its own rules, history, and internal logic, where magic coexisted with the real world without anyone noticing.
It was through this process that the first inhabitants of that universe were born: Harry Potter, of course, but also Ronald Weasley, Hermione Granger, Albus Dumbledore, and Voldemort — figures conceived almost simultaneously in the earliest drafts, even before any publisher had agreed to print the book.
Seven years after that delayed train, in 1997, the first book finally reached bookstore shelves — and what began as an idea clutched tightly for fear of forgetting it would become one of the greatest cultural phenomena of all time.