JK Rowling offers rare insight into her marriage to husband Neil Murray

JK Rowling has offered a rare insight into her 19-year marriage to husband Neil Murray while discussing her favourite and most memorable songs.

The author, 55, who married Neil in 2001 and shares two children with him, shared an anecdote during the Tracks Of My Years segment on Ken Bruce’s Radio 2 show.

While listing some of the songs that have touched her life, Rowling said that she thought Bill Withers’ love song Ain’t No Sunshine was ‘beautiful’.

Explaining her choice for the track, she revealed that her husband told her the song reminds her of how he feels when she is away with work.     

She said: ‘Well I think of all the love songs written, this might be my favourite. It’s such a beautiful, simple sentiment, but I have an additional reason for choosing it, which is that it took lockdown for my husband to say to me… 

‘I was playing it in the kitchen while cooking something; he walked in, he said, “This always makes me think of you when you’re down in London” and that was a very moving marital moment so now it has an extra layer of meaning for me. 

Discussing her lockdown experience, she admitted she has had a ‘special time’ spending time with her husband and their teenage kids. 

She said: ‘Well, I hope that all listeners have had the happy experience that I’ve had of it being quite a special time. We also have teenage kids and it’s been kind of wonderful to spend that extra time with them.’

JK shares children Mackenzie, 15, and David, 17, with Neil, while she is also mother to Jessica, 27, from her previous marriage to Jorge Arantes.

Elsewhere during the interview, JK said Jimi Hendrix’s All Along The Watchtower detailed playing the song after a particularly bad break-up.

However she revealed the reason she loved the song is because she was in awe of how successful Hendrix was at such a young age [27]. 

Explaining her reasoning, she said: ‘It’s just extraordinary that people produce work of that quality when they’re so young… I think the thing I admire most is having the confidence because I had the idea for Harry Potter when I was 25 and I’d done a lot of writing before then, but I was extraordinarily insecure and very rarely shared anything that I’d written. 

‘I wrote some spoof things for friends to make them laugh, but I never shared anything that I’d written in earnest because I was quite insecure. But of course performers are different and they are driven to share in a way that writers don’t do; obviously we live in a far more introverted life, but… I am drawn to biographies of people like Hendrix because I am just in awe of what they did and what they achieved.’

Speaking on her own lack of self-belief, she said: ‘You have to push through your lack of belief. Certainly with Potter and with other things I’ve written, I’ve put them down for months at a time. 

‘I have got better at believing that I can push through. I remember when I was writing Potter I was writing two other things simultaneously and slowly but surely I realised that Potter was the best of them. 

‘And even though I was very insecure I just kept pushing on, pushing on. Actually, the thing that pushed me to complete the book and really to have belief, was having made such a mess of my life generally. In fact I do remember feeling, “Look, so you get turned down by every publisher in the country, what’s to lose now?” Well you know, it was even that I thought it would be a massive success because I certainly didn’t.

What I did believe was, I came to a point where I thought, “This is a good story and I’m going to put everything into this and see what happens.” And I’d lost the fear of failing or rejecting that had probably hampered me a little bit early on in my writing.