JK Rowling’s magical new children’s book
FIRST EXTRACT INSIDE
HARRY Potter author J K Rowling is treating her fans to a new – free – children’s book.
The Ickabog is said to be for ‘children on lockdown, or even those back at school during these strange, unsettling times’.
Miss Rowling, 54, began publishing it online yesterday in daily instalments. It is her first children’s novel since the final Potter novel in 2007. Miss Rowling wrote it more than a decade ago and had intended to release it after The Deathly Hallows. But after reading it to her children, she put the script – part typed, part handwritten – in the attic.
She said she was recently ‘immersed in a fictional world I thought I’d never enter again’ after her children, now teenagers, were ‘touchingly enthusiastic’ about her returning to the story. In a series of messages on Twitter page, Miss Rowling revealed the work had been kept in a ‘very dusty’ Net-A-Porter box that ‘might well have held a premiere dress’.
The first two chapters were published on The Ickabog website yesterday, introducing King Fred the Fearless and fiveyear-old Bert Beamish. There will be daily updates until July 10. The Ickabog is a fearsome monster that is said to eat children and sheep. Miss Rowling has asked young readers to draw their own illustrations to go with the story.
The best pictures will be included in the published book in November, with royalties going ‘to help groups who’ve been particularly impacted by the pandemic’.
‘I think The Ickabog lends itself well to serialisation because it was written as a read-aloud book (unconsciously shaped, I think, by the way I read it to my own children), but it’s suitable for seven to nine-year-olds to read to themselves,’ she said, describing the story as being about ‘truth and the abuse of power’.
But she insisted that ‘it isn’t intended to be read as a response to anything that’s happening in the world right now’, adding: ‘The themes are timeless and could apply to any era or any country.’