J.K. Rowling says that a character in her new novel who’s murdered after being accused of transphobia wasn’t inspired by her own experiences of being criticized online, Variety reports.
Rowling’s latest book, The Ink Black Heart, written under the pen name Robert Galbraith, was published Tuesday by Mulholland Books/Little, Brown. In the novel, detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott investigate the murder of an animator who’s been accused on the internet of racism, ableism, and transphobia. A reviewer for Kirkus called the novel “long, loose, and lax.”
Rowling herself has stirred controversy with tweets, and an essay, that supporters of trans rights have called transphobic. In 2020, some employees of her British publisher, Hachette U.K., said they were considering stopping work on a children’s book by Rowling because of her views on transgender people, and actor Daniel Radcliffe, who famously starred as Rowling’s character Harry Potter in the films inspired by her books, wrote a letter in support of trans rights, evidently in response to Rowling’s comments.
Rowling told podcast host Graham Norton that the slain character in her new novel wasn’t a reaction to her own controversies.
“I should make it really clear after some of the things that have happened the last year that this is not depicting [that],” Rowling said. “I had written the book before certain things happened to me online. 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.”
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Rowling said that she decided to make the character an animator after asking her children what they thought “the most toxic fandom” was.
“To my amazement, they mentioned a certain cartoon, which I’d seen and thought was very witty and funny,” Rowling said. “Then I went online and looked and thought, they’re absolutely right. So that’s why it’s an animator in the book.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
