Rowling rues mother missing success

Harry Potter author JK Rowling has spoken about her late mother's 'painful' battle with multiple sclerosis and the impact it had on the family.

Harry Potter author JK Rowling says it was painful that her mother never knew about her best-selling success.

The writer, whose books have sold in millions around the world and inspired a series of huge hit films about the teenage wizard, described the "guilt and worry and anxiety" brought on by her mother's diagnosis with multiple sclerosis.

Ms Rowling talked about the effect of the illness, which killed her mother when she was 45, on Radio 4's Woman's Hour.

She said: "I was a teenager, but yes, it had the most enormous impact on our family life, and my mother, by the time she was diagnosed, she was quite ill.

"She had been showing symptoms for a few years and didn't know what they were, so by the time she was diagnosed, her health was deteriorating, so it wasn't just the spectre of the unknown, it was dealing with the daily reality of somebody who's starting not to be able to walk as well as they had, and for such an active person that was a real privation."

Asked what her mother would have made of her success, she said: "My mother was a passionate reader, and she would have been excited whatever I did, if I succeeded at anything, but particularly to be a writer, she would have considered to be a very valuable thing.

"Yes, she didn't know, she never knew about Harry Potter - I started writing it six months before she died, so that is painful. I wish she'd known."

The author is the first in a series of guest editors featuring on the long-running British radio show .