Who is Neil Murray, JK Rowling’s husband, her rock for 23 years?

JK Rowling still lives true love in the arms of Neil Murray. On December 26, 2024, the one who imagined the universe ofHarry Potter shared a photo of her and her husband on X, adding as a caption: “Married 23 years today.” If the writer regularly receives criticism and threats when she expresses herself on social networks (she is accused of making transphobic remarks in particular), her husband works behind the scenes to provide her support. “I hope he leaves you for a transgender woman,” reacted one Internet user in response to the photo published on his wedding anniversary. “I just read this to Neil and he said something that made me laugh so hard I almost coughed up a kidney,” retorted JK Rowling, once again proving the complicity between her and her husband who very rarely appears at his side.

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Chance meeting

Neil Murray was 29 when he met his future wife for the first time. She is already famous for having published three years earlier Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone he is a doctor and works as an anesthetist at St John’s Hospital in Livingston. At the time, Joanne Rowling had just freed herself from a tumultuous marriage to journalist Jorge Arantes and was living with her sister in Scotland with her daughter Jessica. For his part, Neil Murray is in the middle of a divorce. It was during a charity event in Edinburgh that JK Rowling and the doctor six years her junior crossed paths. “The evening we met, he told me that he had read the first ten pages ofHarry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone during a night on call at the hospital and that he found it very good. And I thought it was fantastic that he hadn’t read my books. He didn’t have a very clear idea of ​​who I was. This allowed us to get to know each other in a completely normal way,” she confided in an interview for the New Yorker Magazine in 2012.

Express wedding

In 2001, while the couple went to Mauritius for vacation, rumors of marriage began to emerge. In November of the same year, he walked the red carpet for the premiere of the first part ofHarry Potter at the cinema, very discreet. A month later, the agent of the successful author announced that the two lovers said “yes” the day after Christmas, during a private ceremony. Newly married, JK Rowling and Neil Murray quickly decide to expand their family. They became parents to David in 2003 and Mackenzie in 2005. It was during these years that Neil Murray reoriented himself towards general medicine. In the Daily Mailwe read that his areas of focus are “pain management, skin problems, homeopathy and medication abuse management.”

Since then, he has supported his wife in each of her projects. He works alongside him in particular for the needs of Lumos, the NGO co-founded by JK Rowling in 2005 and dedicated to European children without families. Her knowledge of medicine was also useful to JK Rowling when writing her detective saga Cormoran Strikelater adapted for the BBC, which she wrote under the pen name Robert Galbraith. If the writer has never dwelled too much on her relationship, she sometimes gives a glimpse of her private life. In 2020, she evokes the song Ain’t No Sunshine by Bill Withers on Ken Bruce’s ‘Tracks Of My Years’ on Radio 2, saying: ‘I think of all the love songs written, this might be my favourite. (…) I particularly like it because during Covid, when I had put this song in the kitchen, my husband came in and said to me: “This song reminds me of you when you are in London …” (the first lyrics of the song being Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gonenamely in French: “There is no sun when it is not there”, Editor’s note). And this moment particularly marked me.”